Technology selection is a critical success factor for any startup. If you are a startup founder and responsible for the technical strategy, what is the process and the criteria you follow when picking the technology for your MVP? (if you are running an innovation lab in an enterprise, you might facing similar challenges that come under conditions of extreme uncertainty)

292 viewscircle icon3 Comments
Sort by:
CEO in Services (non-Government)4 years ago

I may be an outlier but my choices were always driven by my customers or the user base I saw as the customer as the first criterion, what would give me the best opportunity to meet their demands.  The MVP and final product may be different but the MVP is the first impression for the alpha/beta user and the vc community. So the more feature/function rich the MVP the better the released alpha. The second was scalability - how easy is it to scale- the third, developer community - was it large, vibrant, involved.  In short imo MVP and production release are simply iterations between ideation and reality.

Lightbulb on1
CEO in Services (non-Government)4 years ago

There is no formula for this selection.

However, keep two things in mind.

Scalable - does the technology stack provide scalability. You do not want to start big but you do not want to change technology when you become big.

Flexibility- does the technology let you change quickly? Does it let you integrate with other technology?

Lightbulb on5 circle icon1 Reply
no title4 years ago

I would also add talent availability to this selection as well. Any technology that you select will ultimately need someone to run it and certain skillsets are much more widely available vs. others. So if you go with something more mature and widely adopted in marketplace you will have an easier time building the team, but the downside of it is that it might not be latest and greatest tech stack (the risk here is that few people know how to run it and subsequently your cost basis will be higher).

Lightbulb on2

Content you might like

Inevitable3%

Highly likely14%

Somewhat likely16%

Somewhat unlikely18%

Very unlikely41%

Impossible6%

View Results

Balancing the implementation of organizational policies and developer velocity33%

In-flexibility of existing governance tools in terms of the policy implementation48%

Lack of in-house expertise and knowledge57%

Validating governance policies earlier in the development cycle32%

Ever-changing cloud provider APIs and tools32%

Lack of real-time visibility into resources and configurations across multiple clouds and accounts22%

Ever-changing cloud provider APIs and tools32%

View Results