Technology paradigms have been making shift through decades. Trends are moving fast in terms of offering agile & pivoting solutions to problems at hand.

From an engineering stand point I have seen following evolutionary trend as waves:

IT Application Engineering → Product Engineering → Platform Engineering

With every wave our approach on how we conceptualize a solution from self-build to best-of-breed has gone through ideological change:

IT Application Engineering

• Point-to-Point
• Narrow audience. Build for one works for one

Product Engineering

• Vertical in terms of features
• Broader Audience . Build for features serves many
• Customization may give birth to unmanageable monolith

Platform Engineering

• Horizontal in terms of features
• Wider Audience through knob controls on infrastructure seeding
• Extensible through API design
• Build on top of it and not within
• Scales

With the above evolution & need for diversity in addressing different problem statements , one needs to keep following points in mind :

1. Cookie-cutter approach does not work for diverse business models
2. “Thought partners” are required to co-develop solutions , listen and adopt design inputs instead of simply being vendors
3. Need to address data infrastructure, visualization and distributed microservices
4. Concepts around minimum viable product help understand customers’ journey at a high level and evaluate the technology needs

At such a massive scale, it is always beneficial to develop a set of design principles that can guide your decision-making.

1. Choose tech solutions made by challengers and visionaries with an extensible, API-first mindset
2. Avoid legacy companies that might be lagging behind as they try to evolve their monolithic platforms.
3. Do lot of proof-of-concepts that build hands-on understanding

Platform approach comes with certain amount of decentralization embedded in it for use and extension thus allowing elasticity in solution to serve diverse needs :

When we start thinking on above lines it helps us to become creative across two major parameters:

1. Expanding or Testing into a new market
2. Expanding or Testing a new product line

Technology should enable this entrepreneurial spirit from start-up to scale across various sub-streams.

I hope this short read provides condensed view of how to evolve your technology stack.

Additional Reference

You can find more details and insights in my catch-up with  Segment.com , that got published on their blog last month on How Our Stack Evolved At Cimpress   . Thanks to Geoffrey Keating from Segment for taking the interview.