Tech Guidance for Non-Technical Founders

Changing direction is expected for startups as they find their way towards product-market fit. But changing direction without a plan is expensive. Wasted resources, lost learning opportunities, deceased morale and burnout are real possibilities if there is a lack of focus and no clear process. In other words, discipline is essential. The alternative is sadly the fate of many startups: a frustrating journey on which expectations are never met. Founders need to get good at prioritisation,...

When you're still working out how to serve the most amount of customers in the most focused way, you need to be operating in the build-test-learn cycle. Implicit in this is to build just enough to be able to test the feature in your market. This approach is not well aligned with salaried or paid-hourly development teams because these models incentivise keeping people busy. Consider a process by which you provide detailed requirements and your developers quote a fixed price to get them built....

Shopify do biannual updates to their platform. They call them editions. Their most recent, “Winter ‘25”, was dubbed “The Boring Edition”. While the previous edition was focused on helping businesses expand into new markets, this one was about catching up on technical debt. In their words, “smoothing rough edges, improving performance, and making sure everything works well together.” According to Glen Coates, VP of Product, it was more about “integrating our existing feature set than adding...

Today one of my clients asked me how they can duplicate their whole application to run in the UK. This came from a request from one of their customers to satisfy GDPR laws. When I first set up their application to run in Australia I did it via tools and programming languages (Infrastructure as Code.) This means that we can deploy the UK instance in a couple of hours, because we just need to change a couple of configuration variables, update our deployment pipeline to deploy to both regions,...

Sometimes it's hard to persuade founders to adopt the experiment-learn-adapt cycle. In other words, build the smallest meaningful increment that allows learning via feedback and measurement. Then adapt based on these learnings and repeat.I'm not sure exactly why it is but many are unable to break away from the idea that they must deliver a fully functional, almost perfect product. Maybe it's fear of releasing a product that draw criticism. Maybe they're putting off getting real feedback....

A common question I get from founders is how to structure their development team. Specifically, how many developers they should have and what their roles should be. While it may seem cheaper and “safer” to find one great developer, I always recommend that they have two or more. This is because: you have redundancy if one developer leaves, or is on leave you can have “urgency-based queues”, i.e. one developer is focused on feature work, while the other can respond to more urgent issues like...

As a non-technical founder, tracking the progress of your development team can be a challenge. The technical tasks may not always be clear to you, even if developers assure you they are necessary. This can make it tough to gauge whether progress is on track, especially when the team is partially or fully remote. So, how can you ensure you're in tune with the development process? Is the pace too slow, too fast, or just right? Yes, we're applying the Goldilocks principle here! The key is...

Once your team’s processes are working well, development can sometimes transition into feeling endless. And by contrast, have you noticed how work seems to somehow get done when it’s subject to an immovable deadline? This phenomenon aligns with Parkinson’s Law, which states: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Without clearly defined time periods, work in progress can become virtually infinite, with no clear sense of when it should end. This is why establishing...