Tech debt does gets accumulated during the product life cycle
Thyaga Rajesh
Leader-Manager-Engineer Enterprise SaaS. Installing growth transformations by focusing on Customer experience & Product adoption and Engineering management. #appliedAI
Tech debt, in the context of SaaS products, refers to the build-up of design, code, and architecture choices that prioritize short-term gains over long-term maintainability. Here's how it accumulates throughout the SaaS product life cycle:
Early Stages (Rapid Development & Launch):
Growth Stage (Scaling & Adding Features):
Recommended by LinkedIn
Maturity Stage (Maintaining & Innovating):
Customer Impact: Technical debt can manifest as bugs, performance issues, or outages. This can lead to customer dissatisfaction, churn, and damage the product's reputation.
By understanding how tech debt accumulates throughout the SaaS product lifecycle, companies can take proactive measures to prevent it or manage it effectively. This includes prioritizing code quality, setting aside dedicated time for refactoring, and fostering a culture of technical excellence within the development team.
This perspective is interesting to consider. A crucial question arises: should we address technical debt in the early stages? If so, would we effectively reach the growth stage? It's a delicate balance between iterating towards product-market fit and preparing for a future that may never exist. In my experience, certain practices, like automated deployment and basic automated testing, are indispensable from the outset. However, considerations related to scalability and performance could be intentionally deferred to support business development efforts.
CODE is Wealth - Convert liability CODE to asset with NFRs focus
11moVery apt image and content.. >Focus on Features over Foundation Feature and Foundation should go hand-in-hand. Customers Pay peanuts (e.g. $10 per month) for the features only, but the SaaS company converts peanuts into exponential wealth by scaling paying customers (e.g. 1 million). Hence the need for a CleanCODE NFR team, it is such, new addition that we propose, that works in tandem with usual development and QA teams. This structure works wonders in transformation due to ego-less collaboration, etc. -> Clean is another team skill and work as per new systems standards. SaaS is complex for one reason i.e.: the scale of customers, which leads to more diversity, more 'custom' demands, and 'inflexibility' to change db structure/data and code as it can cause regressions or break existing customer's business.