How To Select The Right Tech-Stack For Your Product
In today's fast-paced realm of technology, where innovation and creativity are the backbone of business success, choosing the right tech stack for your product can be the breaking point between success and stagnation. As technology is moving very fast, so is the variety of tools, frameworks, and programming languages. The abundance of choices can be overwhelming for the decision-makers, leaving them mixed up with what would be the most suitable choice for the product to ensure its excellence.
Selecting the right tech stack is an essential decision, as it must align with the unique product and business requirements. The choice of the tech stack will influence everything, from costs to development speed, user experience, and so on. In this blog, we will go through multiple aspects that need to be considered before choosing a tech stack for your product.
Before you think about it...
Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it
— Anthony J. D'Angelo
Some decision-makers jump to the conclusion that they need to build a product, while in fact, a COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) solution is available at their disposal to fit their needs, with fewer costs of developing and maintaining a new one, be sure to do the diligent research if there is a fitting solution that already exists.
Now, let's dive into the aspects to consider when choosing the tech stack of your product.
Functionality
Selecting the tech stack should match the type of product that is being built and the features and functionality that it will provide. For instance, if you're building a simple static website, you can choose HTML, CSS and JS, whereas if you're building a more sophisticated frontend application, ReactJS or AngularJS could be more suitable. The same applies to the backend; for example, if you are building a data processing product, Python might be more ideal than Golang.
Technology Community Support
One of the factors that you should consider when selecting the right tech stack for your product is the community support of the chosen technologies. Community support refers to the availability and quality of resources, such as documentation, tutorials, forums, blogs, podcasts, and events, that can help you learn, use, and troubleshoot the technologies. Community support can also indicate the popularity, maturity, and reliability of the technologies, as well as the potential for collaboration and innovation. Therefore, you should look for technologies that have active, diverse, and helpful communities that can provide you with the guidance and assistance you need throughout your product development journey.
Integrability / Libraries and Frameworks
Whether the product needs to be integrated with internal or external system(s), decision-makers need to ensure that the chosen tech stack is rich in libraries and frameworks that will allow easy and smooth integration with the other services/solutions. For instance, if the product is supposed to integrate with other APIs to fulfil the functionality, NodeJS, Java, or PHP might be a suitable choice due to their rich amount of libraries. In contrast, if the product is supposed to integrate directly with an existing codebase, choices might be more limited unless an API layer is built between the two code bases, enabling more dynamicity in the choice of the stack.
Scalability / Maintainability
Future scalability and maintainability are essential when choosing a tech stack for your product. Decision-makers should consider the potential growth and evolution of the product, whether it's the number of users or the amount of data that will be residing in the product. For instance, if you're expecting high traffic and load, you might consider using NoSQL databases instead of SQL or choosing SQL with considerations of performance tuning, but keep in mind the complexity that fine-tuning will introduce.
Infrastructure Requirements
Various technologies produce different footprints on resources; this is an essential aspect that a decision-maker must consider, especially if the product is expected to scale quickly. Some technologies are resource-hungry, and some are not. Depending on the product features, decision-makers should consider the resource requirements and probably conduct or refer to benchmarks1 that have been done in the given choices.
Experts Availability
If you're building a brand new product and team or already have an existing team, the availability and costs of experts are crucial factors when selecting a tech stack. If you already have a current team, it's probably better to stick with the stack in which the team is already proficient. However, if you're building a new team, it would be recommended to consider the availability of such experts in your location (or globally) and the costs2.
Conclusion
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to choosing the right tech stack. Decision-makers need to consider a range of aspects, research, compare the pros and cons of each option and consult with experts before making a final decision, as this decision will have a far-reaching impact on the product, business development, and feasibility.