Is your company experiencing growing pains? It happens. Tech leaders in fast-scaling companies encounter some very specific challenges. Read more to find out.
Mikko Röntynen
|RSS FeedDirector of Product Marketing
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Generating more revenue, bringing in more customers, and growing fast are the key accomplishments of a successful company. But those accomplishments also represent a ton of challenges to you and your teams. Challenges like the extra pressure to make sure the technology meets the increasing needs of an ever-growing pool of customers and similarly expanding internal teams.
Being in charge of developing that technology, it's up to the tech leaders (the CTO, CIO, Head of Engineering) to be at the top of their game and address these growing pains.
In this blog post, we’ll look at:
How have successful companies from a range of industries used a managed data platform as part of their transformation strategy? Check out how they solved their business and technical challenges from our ebook.
Grab it hereA happy developer is a productive developer. An unhappy developer is getting ready to move on. When your company is under pressure to grow fast, it also adds pressure to the developers - to deliver applications that much faster, while simultaneously taking care of the work that comes with scaling up.
That’s right - your developers want to be productive, but they can be held back by legacy systems or admin chores like database maintenance, and those tasks only become more consuming as your company grows. Not to mention all the confusion of changes in teams and processes that can also happen. And just like that, your developers are no longer happy - and you know good developers are hard to find.
Sustaining a growing company in good health means bringing in more customers. And that means pressure: pressure to keep current customers happy, and new customers impressed. This is a very closely intertwined concept with the previous one about keeping your developers and engineers happy and productive—it’s very important to keep all of these critical contributors happy at every step.
The ability to continuously develop your product to ensure it delights the customer is critical to customer satisfaction and scalable growth. Whether it’s adding new and useful features, improving your user experience, or just getting your product on shelves a step ahead of the competition—all of these developments pose challenges of their own.
In a competitive field, getting your offering out there in front of customers (and ahead of your competition) is critical. You don’t want to be the tech company with the product-in-development that customers get tired of waiting for, because we all know what happens then.
With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to maximize development velocity by enabling your developers to focus on actual development, not on infrastructure management. Adopt product thinking for internal technical platforms. This will serve the dual purpose of keeping the devs happy, and also providing enhancements to your deliverables like reliability and security—things that keep the customer on board.
If you foster a professional culture where team members feel safe to experiment and are encouraged to innovate, your productivity and delivery headaches will dissipate. If you enable collaboration and communication and eliminate inefficient silo structures in your business areas, efficiency is your reward.
Fast growth means your company might need to:
As a tech leader you’ll need to look at logics and processes to help your new and growing teams work together, and consider new tools to manage all the additional people and data. It can very rapidly turn into an unmanageable nightmare.
As your company grows, you may find that the tech stack and data infrastructure setup you have today no longer meets your needs. You wouldn't want to spend time (and energy) every year, or even every few months, looking for a new tool from a new provider to keep the old cogs turning. And platform and architecture changes are lengthy and costly projects - that don’t create visible customer value.
Try to plan ahead as much as possible. How does your tech setup support your business needs today, and how well is it likely to support your business growth projection for the next year - or more?
Let’s say you need to change from batch to real time data streaming now, but maybe next year you’ll need to add a real time data processing layer on top of it as well. These are the sorts of things you need to consider. But how can you know this? And how do you prepare for it?
As your company scales up, the attention spent on cybersecurity and data privacy can increase exponentially (just like your storage and processing costs, and for basically the same reason). More growth means more data, new systems to handle that data, new suppliers, new people … all these new moving parts, and checking their compliance to cybersecurity and data privacy is an easy step to overlook.
And hackers and other nefarious individuals are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities, and the opportunity to breach your security infrastructure.
We’ve seen a lot of pain points here, and a whole lot of suggestions about what you as a tech leader can do to remove those obstacles for your fast-growing company. Your time is limited and when possible, it’s important to delegate actions so you can focus on the things that drive your business forward.
The good news is, by taking a managed data platform into use you can outsource a lot of these vital steps. Want to know how a managed data platform like Aiven can ease your growing pains and fuel your company?
We’ve got you covered.
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