Adopt a product mindset and build your own ecosystem
Are legacy technology choices (that once served a purpose) now holding you back? Businesses no longer need to be shackled by their monoliths. Instead of buying a pricey enterprise software stack and adjusting your operations in line with its capabilities, there’s a far more valuable and intuitive solution: a tech ecosystem.
Yes, building a brand-new greenfield platform might be the pipedream, but it’s simply impractical. The time and resource required to build something from scratch is highly likely to outweigh the return. The savvy solution is to reframe the buy vs. build decision and make the most of both. For instance, why would you set your team the task of creating your own CMS when there are plenty of fully functioning solutions already on the market? Surely a better use of everybody’s time would be to buy best-in-need commodities and build innovative, custom products that differentiate you. Essentially, creating a composable architecture gives you the best of both worlds.
Realise the value of composable
By breaking down your stack into services and digital products, you’ll be able to choose what you need and ditch what you don’t – streamlining your costs. But the true value of a tech ecosystem is that you can build it to suit your organisation’s unique needs. And that you can compose it in such a way that you can plug and play with new products without it affecting your overall infrastructure. It provides flexibility that could never be achieved with a monolithic tech stack.
Utilise an array of vendors
What’s more, a composable architecture supports full interoperability across numerous vendors, giving you access to a greater range of capabilities. When we say, ‘best in need’, you really do have the freedom to pick and choose the commodities that best match your interests.
Adopt a product mindset
What’s more, a composable architecture supports full interoperability across numerous vendors, giving you access to a greater range of capabilities. When we say, ‘best in need’, you really do have the freedom to pick and choose the commodities that best match your interests.
Empower your engineers
For complex monoliths, a lot of time can be spent ‘keeping the lights on’ and fixing issues. From your product team’s perspective, it’s not exactly fulfilling work. By shifting to a composable architecture, you’ll be giving them more opportunities to build progressively and develop more innovative features. And you won’t just be supporting your team’s growth, but also your organisation’s. Of course, an added bonus is satisfied employees stick around.
So, what are the fundamentals of building an ecosystem?
First of all, you need to decide which products and services you buy and which ones you build. We find that it’s easy to overbuy or overbuild. Finding the right balance is critical to developing an effective solution.
It’s also important to base these choices on the maturity of your organisation – both from an engineering perspective and an operating one. A supplier that’s perfect for one business, might be completely wrong for another – depending on its size, the complexity of its requirements, or the tech stack that’s currently being used. Sometimes we find that our clients are desperate to replatform but actually, the processes are at fault, not the stack.
When working with our clients to establish their composable architecture, we aim to bridge the age-old gap between the business and its technology. Once teams have adopted a product mindset, they have a better understanding of the tools and are able to maximise the value delivered from their digital services. That’s why our ethos is to develop your team alongside your digital capabilities, so you can become self-sufficient in the future.
Learn more about how AND Digital works
In our third online event for the ‘Building Your Digital Future’ series, James Sharpe, Chief for Strategic Alliances at AND Digital; Stuart Barker, Practice Lead - Technology Consulting at AND Digital; and Jim Herbert, Senior Vice President and General Manager EMEA at BigCommerce (one of our partners); will be discussing in more detail how to build an ecosystem that thrives.
Register for the webinar on 11 August 2022 at 3pm to join the conversation and discover their insights.
