CEOs, CXOs, VPs: be nosy about tech decisions — they are your business!
Engineering managers: consider non-technical business factors in all of your decisions!
Here are 3 examples of what are commonly considered to be purely tech decisions, but have serious implications for the company as a whole.
Here are 3 examples of what are commonly considered to be purely tech decisions, but have serious implications for the company as a whole.
Which framework should we use, Angular or React?
Do we build a monolith or go with microservices?
Choosing a tech stack, architecture, or framework is just as much a business decision as a technical one.
Recruitment:
- How easy is it to recruit engineers to work on this stack? How easy will it be in a few years?
Operating costs:
- What will the operating costs be?
- At what scale do they become worthwhile?
- At what scale will they become unsustainable?
Development & maintenance costs:
These can vary significantly, depending on what scale of traffic you optimise for. Higher scale can cost a lot more because it is more complex, takes longer to develop and requires more highly experienced engineers. Maintenance costs go up for the same reason.
How many "nines" of uptime should we aim for? 99.5% or 99.999%?
Costs skyrocket exponentially if you need an uptime guarantee of over 99.5%. That makes it a business decision, that should be based on a cost/benefit analysis.
Note that these are not only operating costs; software development and maintenance costs rise significantly too.
To know more about this, see Uptime Guarantees — A Pragmatic Perspective.
To know more about this, see Uptime Guarantees — A Pragmatic Perspective.
Should we choose Jira, GitHub Issues, or Trello?
This one is surprising!
At one company, we picked Jira, even though it was overkill at the time.
We didn't know it, but a different decision would have cost the company months in terms of launch delays.
In order to get necessary operating licences, we had to pass strict third-party security audits, which included showing that our development and operational processes were secure.
Our use of Jira's granular permissions, automated workflows, extensive logging and reporting contributed significantly to our passing with flying colours on our first attempt.
❓ What seemingly mundane decisions have you made that had a dramatic effect on your company?
Tell me about it by commenting on this LinkedIn post.