The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy

6Technology Excellence Creating scalable and secure tech platforms for future growth

With Christoph Richter

Note: The Builder’s Guide assumes a product-led model where autonomous product and technology teams led by product owners address customer-focused goals (e.g., acquisition, conversion). Under this model, software developers tend to be deployed in cross-functional product and tech teams and work collaboratively to achieve customer-centric goals (see Chapter 5). With technology function setups and practices evolving rapidly in tech scale-ups, this chapter reflects on the state of the art of building technology functions at the time of writing.

Key pitfalls to avoid for scale-up builders

• Failing to drive enough independence in the tech teams

  Whereas with manual deployment pipelines a lot of scripts and yaml files might work in smaller engineering organizations, things will break when scaling. Trying to minimize the cognitive load for every team by setting up teams as independently as possible so that they don’t have to wait for each other when touching the code base is key here. The most common approach to solve this is by establishing an internal development platform team to take over a lot of the heavy lifting for the individual teams and improve the overall developer experience (see Practices 36 and 38).

• Unconsciously building technical debt

  While a company is always ...