The importance of having a good technical team

Launch is an exciting time. While the business team is thinking about going to market, announcements, metrics of success, and how to attract customers, the behind-the-scenes team, or tech team also has a lot to do. No jokes when we say launching season is overtime season! You may be in doubt, and may ask, “what does the tech team even do? I thought their jobs were done once the app launches?” Here are some of those things.

Staging vs Production servers, builds, environments

Tech team has to separate internal builds from what users see. Anything internal is a work in progress, may have unfinished changes or bugs. Once it goes out to users it needs to be rock solid, and this becomes critical after launch. Imagine that the tech team does not do a good job – then users will see tons of bad interfaces, or will have bugs every 5 seconds. We surely don’t want that, do we? 

Even before launching, separating the production environments is also critical. The tech team set up separate production environments and servers based on expected user loads, and they have to make sure it can be scaled up later on. It may seem easy, trust us, it’s not. It could take days, or weeks, or even months, to make sure that things go smoothly!

API keys

A modern system can have a lot of components. App builds, API servers, frontend servers, payment processors, external services… to name just a few! Each of these components may have a test environment and a production environment. The tech team needs to make sure that they are all connected to the right ones, otherwise the system may collapse and refuse to work later.

Quotas and rate limits

Cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud make it easy to scale quickly, but also easy to incur unwanted or unexpected high costs. Quotas and rate limits are useful to prevent this.  They can be low for test environments, but need to be judged carefully for the production environment to prepare for launch. The tech team has to pay close attention to quotas and rate limits, especially before and after launching.

Monitoring

The tech team also needs monitoring, tracking and alerting us of issues, bugs, downtime. They provide troubleshooting information so issues can be detected and resolved quickly. A great tech team can help monitor and run a system smoothly.

Analytics

Analytics are also keys! The team considers and implements analytics well before launch. To do that, they also have to spend time understanding business goals and important metrics. If MVP, they also need to test a hypothesis – what data will be needed to get a clear answer. This work can get really tedious and mentally exhausting.

App store approval

If the launch includes a mobile app, it will need to be approved by Apple and Google.  Although this process is much faster now than in the early days of the app stores, it can still be time consuming and may require changes to the app.  The team should allocate a few weeks. At MobileFolk, we start this process well in advance of launch to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Other approvals

Apple App Store and Google Play Store approvals get all the attention, but complex integrations with other external partners often need a similar approval process.  Examples may include credit card payment processors, e-commerce platforms like Shopify, music services like Spotify, etc.  The process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks, so it is important to start early.

At MobileFolk, our tech team takes every step of the process seriously. We work tirelessly to bring you the best result, and needless to say, all of our clients so far are satisfied with what we bring to the table. If you want your business to shine and come off as flawless, shoot us a message today!