Building a scalable tech stack: The playbook of the fastest-growing Mobile App.

Here’s a little piece of information for you. Statistics reveal that, in 2021, a typical mid-market company would use 185 different Apps in their tech stack.

If you see such numbers and feel overwhelmed, then you’re not alone.

According to Gartner, technology sprawl is one of the top ten difficult business challenges faced by businesses today.

Unless managed properly and carefully, tech stack sprawl can be incredibly debilitating to a company or an organization, leaving you with inefficient and ineffective spending and substandard customer experiences.

Hence, what can do you to build a technology stack with scalability in mind that doesn’t slow your growth process down and lock you in?

It starts with choosing a very flexible system of technologies that doesn't compromise on functionality and can be swapped in and out as your business grows, expands, and your requirements change.

The segment is what solves this.

It acts as a middle layer between your website or app that you are working on and your tech stack. This gives marketers a competitive edge: you can quickly improve your stack as new and better tools evolve and come out, or as your requirements embrace a new change.

Building a tech stack should commence by answering two important questions:

·      What would my customer journey look like?

·      What tools could help me optimize that customer journey more effectively?

Importance of Understanding your customer journey

Before you start building, reviewing, or revising your tech stack, there are few steps you need to take to understand your customer journey better.

1. Map your customer journey

First, identify all the stages your customers go through and the reason they would go through them. This will start to give you an idea of the places where opportunities for improvement exist and how you would like to leverage them.

2. Establish good data collection.

Good data collection is the engine that drives your tech stack. It reveals what is actually going on in your customer journey by providing a clear and comprehensive picture of who your customers really are and what they’re doing.

3. Send that data to analytics tools

To make actual sense of your data, there are two categories of tools that you can choose from:

A) specialized analytics tools.

B) business intelligence tools. The sole purpose of these tools is to visualize the customer journey that we mapped out earlier using actual and real customer data.

4. Pinpoint areas of opportunity

In order to grow, you need a well-oiled customer journey that takes people down the conversion funnel very quickly and with some sense of regularity.

Now that you have an understanding of what your customer journey actually looks like, you can see how it really behaves. This will give rise to tough and difficult questions and help you identify hiccups and hitches that slow or interrupt the customer journey.

The different types of tools you can use at each stage of your customer journey:

Now that you have a good understanding of your customer journey, you can actually start to build your tech stack on top of it.

We describe this as what we call the “choose your own adventure” process because every company’s customer journey will reveal different opportunities that are present.

Out of these opportunities will come extremely focused objectives that solve real-time problems that are affecting one’s company’s growth. So, let us get back to our two-part question:

·      What’s my top business priority or objective at the moment?

·      What tools can help me realize my objective faster and more effectively?

What tools you actually choose for your tech stack depends on the objectives you identify for each new stage of the customer journey.

Let us take you through how we would usually go about this process, along with some different tools to consider.

You need to keep in mind, this is actually a strategy for building your tech stack, not a prescription for which tool you need to use.

Engagement

We usually inspect engagement at first, because low engagement among your current customers is often an indicator of poor customer retention.

Any efforts to improve the rest of the journey may not be as effective as you may think, because if your customers aren’t sticking around your company, you’re filling a leaky bucket that makes no sense. Does it?

At the beginning of the engagement stage, your business need or requirement may be either “to grow the actual number of active users over a given amount of time” or “to increase the total volume of content consumption within our product.” To achieve different objectives, here are few commonly used software categories.

Email and marketing automation tools

If you’re seeing or observing a significant drop-off in usage, email, and marketing, automation tools can nudge users to take any action and pull them back into the product that you are offering.

This example from Airbnb is really effective because that big, bold zero reminds you that you’re not earning as much money as you could be. Therefore, you hop back in the app to finish your hosting profile to start earning money.

CONCLUSION:

While developing an application, a major factor in your app's success would be your choice of tech stack and how you plan to use it for further growth of both the product and your organization.

Why our tech stack has a large impact on scalability, and a poor choice can needlessly increase your costs, expenses or constrain developments down the line.

Thus, now you know how to build the ultimate tech stack for scale.