How to Scale Your Business and Overcome Future Growth Challenges

In the software development context, the architecture of a system is the structure needed to understand the system. Evolutionary architecture is the system architecture that is adopted with change in mind.

As a result, such architecture optimizes the cost of change in the technology. Adopting an evolutionary architecture when building your technology will make future change requests less costly, since your team can easily implement such changes.

In addition to adopting an evolutionary technology, it’s important to document the product architecture when building your product. Product architecture helps your team understand the relationship between the elements of a product and its functions.

Creating a well-defined product architecture ensures that your team can implement change requests efficiently, as it helps your team identify the next steps to be taken in order to fulfill a change request.

Daniel recommends ensuring that everyone on the product team understands the product architecture. In his words, “It doesn’t matter if they’re the Product Owner or engineers; they need to understand the architecture.”

They don’t need to understand all of the product features or use cases, but they do need to understand the architecture, because that will drive future expansion opportunities.

Before implementing any change request, it’s important to consider the business value of such requests. As Daniel put it, “It’s important to think about new feature requests conceptually and ensure that these changes fit into the overall product vision.” This will also make communicating the necessary changes to the engineering team easier.

The first growth level your company will likely experience is geographic expansion. Your company may extend its operations to a new city, new area, or new country. Geographic expansion is the classic business growth dimension.

This type of expansion may require little work from the tech team and more effort from the strategy or operations team. However, as a tech leader, understanding your company’s geographic expansion goals will guide your product development strategy.

The second growth dimension involves massively automating processes to improve efficiency. However, identifying the processes to be automated and scaled may be a bit challenging. Daniel recommends prioritizing functions that your company won’t be able to perform at the same speed if it becomes ten, a hundred, or a thousand times bigger.

Importantly enough, that doesn’t necessarily mean the most expensive or labor-intensive functions. In his words, “It’s purely a scale question. If your company becomes a hundred times bigger, can you still perform that function a hundred times more with no automation?”

This growth dimension requires technical expertise. As a tech leader, you may need to suggest using machine learning, artificial intelligence, or deep learning to automate the processes.

The third growth dimension involves expanding the business operating model with the same infrastructure to offer more services. Daniel recommends identifying new business lines by assessing the most important thing your business needs to do at the moment.

The bugs you need to fix and the features you need to add to your product are typically good sources of new business lines and services.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of benchmarking your product or services against existing market solutions. However, you may not be able to grow beyond the current market size if you do so. In Daniel’s words, “Copying competitors lets you get better at their game, but you can reinvent the game or play a completely different game instead.”

So, instead of comparing your product with the competition’s, Daniel recommends adopting a white-paper approach by brainstorming the best possible solutions and delivering the most automated solution for the future. This way, your organization can operate and scale in multiple dimensions simultaneously with less effort.

Most businesses find it difficult to move slower in the beginning, as it requires commitment from the team, investors, and other stakeholders. However, according to Daniel, it’s best to move slowly in the beginning, to ensure that you figure out everything from scratch.

Once you have discovered an innovative product and the fastest way to scale it, you will be able to move much faster down the line.

Evolutionary architecture may appear to be just systems and processes to many engineers, but software architecture defines the future limitations or opportunities for your technology.

For example, if you’re thinking about implementing a new feature, extending the current implementation, or making it more scalable, these changes would be driven by the core architecture.

Modeling such changes in your architecture ensures that the implementation is much easier. Architecture also makes a huge difference to your tech stack, since its growth is dependent on how quickly you can move faster. This is especially true if you’re working for a non-startup, where you have to change existing code more and write new code less.

Therefore, making architecture a top priority between tech, product, and business is important to promote a scalable business environment.

Tech leaders often focus on the technology and development processes. However, getting more involved in the business and finding an architecture linking tech and business matters. As Daniel puts it, “You need to think more about outcomes and KPIs, and not just features for your product.”

Daniel recommends defining the relevant KPIs for your tech stack and assessing how these metrics will improve with every new feature implementation. This will help you create metrics or form KPI-based judgments at scale.

Examples of such KPIs could be the conversion rate the new feature would drive or the customer retention rate. Beyond setting KPIs for your product or technology, you can also set KPIs for operations like the hiring process.

According to Daniel, you should review your team’s short-term strategy weekly, and the long-term strategy quarterly. For instance, you can review the product and business roadmaps every quarter, then plan your strategy for the next three months.

Conducting these periodic reviews will ensure that you’re on track with what your company hopes to achieve in the next few years.

You may discover new opportunities that require your strategic direction to be updated. Also, new technology may become available that may not immediately apply to your organization, but could become more relevant to you after a while.

Hence, it’s best to be flexible with your strategy and adjust as needed. You can always organize hackathons or build prototypes to test your updated strategy or the new technology before adopting them.

Look out for processes that you can automate to make scaling less challenging. For instance, Picnic launched a fulfillment center where all operations are robotized. This has reduced their Product Picker’s waiting time in the warehouse by 95%, as the customers’ orders come to the Product Picker.