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Developer's Guide to Tech Strategy

swyx on April 22, 2020

Author's Note: This is a free chapter of the Strategy section of The Coding Career Handbook. If you liked this, come check out the rest of the top...
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thomaslombart profile image
Thomas Lombart

Thanks for this post! I think it's essential to understand what's the business model of your company and where the money comes from. We, developers, can have huge impacts on companies, and the choices we make day-to-day should take the business goals into account.

As feedback, I found your post really insightful but also a little bit hard to read because of the vocabulary specific to the business and finance :)

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swyx profile image
swyx

thanks! well.. i hope people will google stuff they dont know. cant keep stopping to explain each word 😂 but when i publish i'll go over one more time to see if i can reduce jargon while still communicating the same thing.

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juliang profile image
Julian Garamendy

Awesome article/section!

Just wondering where do you think video games fall in the Business Models categorisation?

I'm thinking mobile games with in-app purchases (not necessarily subscriptions) that keep "customers" for years.
Candy Crush has been around for 7 years now. Is it a pay-as-you-go "subscription"?

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swyx profile image
swyx

mm thats a good one. you could call it a subscription but it doesnt really reflect the dynamics of the games biz - free for most and then a few whales make up the majority of the revenues. can consider it either a casino (esp if you can sell items from lootboxes), or a D2C ecommerce brand with purely virtual goods.

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nicolasini profile image
Nico S___

These are very important concepts to grasps for any developer (at any seniority level) that wishes to have a high level of autonomy in their trade.
If you fail to understand what your business needs, then someone will always have to be there to make sure you deliver it (project managers, product owners, etc)

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Amit Biswas

Few simple things should also be considered when you are building something -

  1. Is it worthwhile?
  2. Is there similar thing exists? If so, how is my contribution is unique?
  3. Is it beneficial for others?

If all of your answers are satisfying, proceed without fear. Your honest approach will single handedly do the rest. Even if it is a machine like Google!

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rahulsukhwal profile image
JPLoft

‍‍Your industry knowledge is always full of golden nuggets, Thank you for sharing this useful post. The Technical strategy serves as one of the guiding principles for the Engineering team to operate. The Technical strategy focuses on how to build the project. Technical strategy is an abstract idea for many developers who are providing software development services. Many organizations have an Engineering team but few have a well-defined technological strategy.

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Naveen

Woah, I wonder how much time it takes to be a specialist in this field. Thanks for all this information. Also, I would love to tell you that I am a blogger and doing some wordpress guide. It would be a lot if you give my website a look and tell me if it's good or not. Link: 9to5wordpress.com/what-is-ad-netwo...

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entony79129727 profile image
Entony

The author really understands the topic. But I would like to ask the question what metrics are used to assess marketplace liquidity? According to the idea, they should be universal for any product. By the way, I can find a detailed description here. Or should you use a unique approach to each type of product?