Many companies overlook scalability until it’s too late. From startup founders to full-blown businesses who are building certain products for the targeted market, you can witness situations where the products start to struggle. Those struggles could be shaped as an inability to develop certain features due to too big costs or technical debt where your solution is not delivering needed expectations to the users. Let’s take a closer look at why scalability is vital and how to address these common problems.
Technical debt
Let’s start with a very common problem that every development team is struggling to some degree –technical debt. Technical debt is a term used for defining parts of the product that need to be re-implemented in the future. There can be many reasons why debt is created, but the most common is prioritizing delivery over proper implementation. This is very common when teams are building new features that need to reach the market and be validated as fast as possible.
If we take a step back, the actual problem is not the debt itself but accumulating the amount of the same. If the debt is not addressed at the right time, it can easily happen that the performance of the solution will be impacted, but even more importantly, the velocity of building the new features will be reduced, too.
There is no easy solution or secret receipt that can tell you how to improve handling and minimize the impact of technical debt, but still, there are ways the impact of it can be anticipated and minimized.
Missing features
Every product, regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C, sooner or later ends up with customers asking for more features. The expectations for having functionalities beyond MVP were never higher, and having a situation where you can’t deliver those on time can make customers unhappy and, in some cases, push them to look for alternative or competitive options.
This is the struggle of many teams and many products and the reason why many of those failed to survive even if they were “market pioneers.”
Bad decisions
Both problems, the missing feature and technical debt, have a root cause in bad decisions from the decision-makers. Those can be product managers, technical leads, and sometimes the founders themselves. It’s pointless to point a finger, but more important to understand why those bad decisions are so often in product development.
The first main reason is the wrong focus and consequentially choosing the wrong priorities when it comes to implementation. Very often, scalability is linked with the usage of the product, and it’s pushed aside as a “good” future problem to have. A much more important aspect of scalability, the scalability to develop, is completely ignored.
This mistake can cause unforeseen technical debt. It can introduce a need to refactor, which starts increasing costs and, at the same time, the risk of churn. It also starts to hit people, introducing demotivation in the teams and anxiety among stakeholders.
All this sounds like a dark scenario, but that dark scenario is the reality of many products. To emphasize that thought, it’s worth mentioning that 80% of SaaS startups fail within the first 2-5 years of being on the market.
Scalability with StormHub Engine
To end this article positively, all the problems described so far are the reasons why we built the StormHub Engine. Witnessing repetitively the same problems, we come up with a solution for them.
The StormHub Engine is a solution that provides fundamental components as building blocks of your product. It’s designed from the beginning to be modular, scalable, and easily extendable. Beyond the architecture, the standard components provide a standardized and managed set of features that are common for most digital products, from user management and authentication and built-in multitenancy to billing and AI integration modules. With StormHub Engine, we enable faster go-to-market without sacrificing future scalability or introducing technical debt.
Besides Engine, we also package our offering with StormHub Platform. A one-stop solution where the whole technical management and ownership is taken care of by us, leaving you focused on growing your business and making your customers happy.
Ready to Tackle Scalability
If you’re facing challenges with scalability or technical debt, or you want to avoid them from the start - reach us at info@stormhub.cloud, and let’s talk.