Build vs Buy

Even though apparel is our core business, @Faballey is a very tech-strong organization. And that is actually by design. We have a tech-first approach towards everything that we do and make sure that all business functions enable tech to its fullest. As the tech leader here, it becomes my responsibility to make important decisions about tech adoption. One of the biggest types of decisions that I face is Build vs Buy. This is all the more pertinent in our case because I lead a very strong team of highly qualified developers who can build anything that the business needs. A lot of our tools, both client-facing and internal have been built by this fabulous team only. This makes the "Build" option very lucrative to us since its hassle-free and guaranteed to be fully integrated with the existing systems. But. Should we be building something simply because we have the capability of building it? Absolutely not.

Be it Faballey where tech is mostly an enabler or the Googles and Facebooks of the world where tech is the actual product - developer bandwidth is always the scarcest resource. The limiting factor. In other words, there are never enough developer hours available to take up and deliver all the projects the business wants to undertake, This makes it absolutely critical that the developers are always only working on the projects that are the highest value-adding projects for the business and everything else becomes secondary. Having developers invest their time in building something that could possibly be purchased pre built which might have fulfilled the business need to a great extent is a waste of expensive resources. Let the developers do things only they can do for the business. Things that are proprietary, things that are prohibitively expensive to buy. Do not involve them in building, testing, fixing, and maintaining applications that could very well have been acquired from the market.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think building in-house is always the right decision?