Startups' ability to deliver software quickly and confidently is one of the key factors that determine their success. It is crucial to be agile and quick in order to attract more customers who interact with businesses via a digital interface. It is what determines whether a company survives.It is important to ensure that your software delivery strategy changes with your startup. As your startup grows, your software choices and processes will change. However, optimizing too early and letting them grow without having a clear vision can cause you to lose time and agility. The right decisions can yield huge benefits, while the wrong ones can cause costly and time-consuming problems that could be avoided.Consistency is the key to success. Establish a standard and then apply it to all delivery channels.Conways law has shown us that your software architecture is closely linked to your organizational structure. Both your organizational structure and architecture have a significant impact on how well you deliver. This holds true for every stage of a startup, but it is even more relevant when considering how startups grow rapidly. Software delivery in a two-person team is very different to software delivery in a 200-member team.You can either mount roadblocks or turbocharge your growth by making key decisions at critical growth inflection points.Create a foundation stage: Keep it simpleThe exciting exploratory phase of the founding phase is called the exploratory phase. You have an idea, and you have a few engineers.Keeping the architecture and tooling simple and adaptable is key to success in this phase. Execution is the key to building a company. Get the tools you need and then put the rest aside.Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) is a place where you can make a small investment without overdoing. CI/CD allows developers to quickly get feedback, learn from it and deliver code changes reliably and efficiently. Learning fast is key to product-market fit. You will have the tools and practices to deal with complex systems when they become more complicated. Your competitors will have a huge advantage if you are unable to quickly learn and adapt.Operatability is another area where simple investments can really pay off. The simplest codebase is the one that you want: a monolithic and basic deploy. Without basic tools for observability, every user issue will take you far longer to resolve. This is time that you could use to improve your feature set.You may use placeholders that are simple to implement. These placeholders will require you to design well so you can improve later without huge rewrites.Early stage: Keep efficiency and productivity highYou probably don't have any developer efficiency or tooling person at your 10-20 engineers. The company priorities are constantly changing, so it can feel overwhelming for your team to work together as one team. You can find more flexible ways to create independent workstreams that don't require team definitions or deep expertise. It will be more beneficial for your team to have everyone responsible for creating tools and processes, rather than just one person. It will increase efficiency and productivity over the long-term.
