A tech stack is a set of technologies you use to build a digital product.
If chosen wisely, this tech set, tech stack, or whatever you want to call it, will keep your processes flowing and teams aligned.
This brings us to your next question: how do I choose the right technologies for my team?
The best place to start is to understand how different tools impact different teams and product planning, development, and delivery.
You’ll also need to choose tools that align with team goals:
- Flexible solutions that you can slot in and out
- Tech that can be set up quickly through integrations
- Tools that maximize scalability
- Low-cost options to test the waters
There’s a lot to consider, so we’re here to help you choose a tech stack for your team.
What does a product tech stack usually include?
These technologies can include programming languages, databases, frontend and backend frameworks, product analytics, business intelligence tools, and even API services that stitch everything together.
Different teams will need different tech stacks.
- Web development teams will have one stack, like MERN or MEAN (don’t worry, we’ll explain what those terms mean below).
- App developers will have another that uses platform-oriented technologies like Swift for iOS apps.
- Product designers will have a still different version that includes platforms like Figma for designing and prototyping, Amplitude to track UX analytics, and HotJar for in-app surveys.
Software tech stacks have two parts: the frontend and the backend.
Developers use frontend tools to build the application’s customer-facing parts — basically, everything you see on your screen.
There are usually three core parts to a front-end technology stack:
- HTML: The markup language used to create web pages.
- CSS: Cascade Style Sheets, which determine the design of web pages.
- Javascript: A popular programming language developers use to make web pages interactive and dynamic. Several JavaScript-based frameworks like Angular and React can help programmers streamline development.
HTML is fundamental to web development. So it’s no surprise it’s the most popular skill in the web development tech stack, chosen by 57% of developers.
Developers use back-end or server-side tools to make your website or app function. These technologies do all the heavy lifting so the front end can meet customer expectations.
Back-end technology stacks are more complicated than their front-end counterparts and use a combination of technologies, including the following:
- Programming languages: These include JavaScript, PHP, and Python.
- Databases: Collections of structured data. These tend to be MySQL, NoSQL, Object-oriented, or Cloud databases.
- Frameworks: Similar to their front-end cousins, these are predefined structures that accelerate development. These include Django and Laravel.
- Web servers: A computer program or physical computer that stores, processes, and delivers data. Popular choices include Google Cloud and Apache.
- Operating systems: The underlying programs that host and manage all other applications. These include Linux and Microsoft.
While you can combine any of these technologies to build a custom solution for your company, developers often turn to several common stacks. These include LAMP, MERN, and MEAN, which we’ll explore in more detail later in the article.
How do you choose the right tech stack?
Product managers and developers must carefully consider which technologies they use since these will govern how they build and maintain applications. Their choices can also impact which developers you hire and to what extent your company succeeds.
Bottom line: the more aligned your tech stack is with your team and goals, the easier it will be to do your job.
1. Learn about tech stacks
The first place to start is to learn about different tech stacks.
Learning about them will help you better collaborate with your company’s developers and create more accurate product timelines.
Each stack has its strengths and weaknesses. While some, like Ruby on Rails, are designed for rapid deployment, others, like LAMP, are more customizable. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each will help you make more informed decisions about the future of your product, including how to scale it.
It will also help you communicate better with technical teams. Developers can get frustrated by product managers who lack the technical knowledge to understand what they’re doing and cannot estimate how long it will take them to complete work. This can lead to a breakdown in communication, unrealistic timelines, and missed deadlines.
2. Determine your project type
You need to pick the right technologies for your project. If you’re building a mobile application, for example, you’ll have to use platform-oriented solutions and frameworks.
The size of your project will also be a factor. Small projects lend themselves to simple stacks. Larger and more complex projects will naturally have more moving parts and will require more technologies.
3. Understand time constraints
Some technologies, especially those using Ruby or Node.JS, are better suited to rapid deployment because they work using reusable code snippets. So, if you’re working to a tight deadline, using Ruby on Rails or MEAN/MERN will be vital.
4. Know your budget
Costs can vary massively depending on the software you use. Common costs include:
- Hosting and servers
- Licensing fees
- Developer salaries
- Ongoing maintenance
To decrease costs as much as possible, you can choose open-source versions like LAMP. Other open-source technologies like React.js are also suitable, as are cloud platforms that offer pay-as-you-go payment methods.
5. Understand existing expertise
Unless you’re willing and able to hire a new development team, it makes sense to use familiar technologies where possible. It helps that these tend to be tried and tested solutions, too.
That’s not to say you can’t adopt a new technology or framework where appropriate. Just remember to take the learning curve into account. Choosing one with ample documentation and an active community can help in this regard.
6. Consider future requirements
Product teams must consider how their product may change in the future. Will there be many more users? Will new features be required? What about translating your product to reach new markets — what localization and translation software will use you use?
Where significant changes are likely, developers should think about vertical scaling (adding new features by increasing processing power) and horizontal scaling (accommodating more users by adding new servers and other resources).
7. Security and compliance
Some apps need to be more secure than others. Think of the difference between the banking app on your phone and the latest mobile game you downloaded.
Where security is paramount, you’ll want to use a solution that is robust enough to withstand cyberattacks and data breaches. That often means incorporating additional technologies like Transport Layer Security (TLS), a cryptographic protocol used to secure communications over a network.
8. Integration with existing systems
The last thing you want to do is create data silos. But that’s exactly what can happen if you choose technologies that don’t integrate with your existing systems.
Whether it’s a third-party software tool, an API, or a legacy database, developers will need to choose technologies that integrate with each other to ensure current and future compatibility.
Tech stacks provide a framework for product managers and developers to oversee the development of a digital product. Knowing which technologies power your product will make it easy to plan for the future, as you will already know your infrastructure and hardware requirements.
4 benefits when product teams use the right tech stack
The right tech stack will make your product easier to maintain, shorten development times, and ensure consistency during development.
Code reuse and maintainability
The right programming languages can make coding products much easier for developers. Ruby on Rails uses the same programming language throughout, for instance, which means developers can reuse code at will.
This will also make it easier to maintain products in the future. Even if you use more than one programming language, most developers will be familiar with standardized stacks like LAMP, MEAN, and MERN, allowing new hires to jump in and start updating code immediately.
Development standardization
A tech stack ensures a standardized approach to development across the project. It doesn’t matter what tools you use (assuming it’s suitable for the project) as long as everyone agrees and knows how to use the component technologies.
Your stack also defines how you can grow your product in the future and what tools are available for things like testing and translation. The underlying technologies lay the path for how the product can be grown in the future and how to account for increased users.
Documentation and community support
By choosing well-known and popular tech stacks, your developers will have access to reams of documentation and the support of massive communities. This is particularly true if they pick open-source solutions like LAMP or AngularJS.
These communities can help developers overcome any roadblocks they encounter during the development process, improving the performance of their apps and accelerating development time.
Shorter development timelines
The right tech stack can streamline the development process, reducing the time and effort required to build products and speeding up time to market. Certain frameworks are built for speed, so using these makes sense when time is of the essence.
But almost any well-defined stack can shorten development times by allowing developers to focus on coding rather than worrying about what other technologies they need to use or implement. It will also make it easier for companies to recruit talented programmers to help with development and maintain the product in the future.
Product managers and developers should regularly audit their tech stacks and ensure they use technologies that help them efficiently build and maintain new applications as their business grows.
5 top tech stacks commonly used by startups
Most development teams don’t build a tech stack from scratch. Instead, they use one of the following popular stacks as a foundation for their product and add other technologies and applications where necessary to handle challenges such as language barriers and security.
Here are five of the most common solutions teams might use in:
1. LAMP
LAMP consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
LAMP is a stalwart stack that remains popular today due to its reliability and cost efficiency.
It uses Linux as the operating system, Apache as a web server (for serving pages to the end user), MySQL as the database that stores and manages information, and PHP as the server-side programming language to generate web pages.
MySQL is the most common database in Stack Overflow’s most recent Developer Survey — it was chosen by over half of developers.
What’s great about LAMP is that it’s completely open-source. It’s also very customizable. You can swap out operating systems (like trading Windows for Linux, making it WAMP) or programming languages without affecting much.
2. MEAN
The MEAN stack includes MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js.
This stack uses MongoDB, a document-based NoSQL database that stores data in JSON-like format; Express.js, a web application framework that can handle APIs and HTTP requests; Angular, a front-end framework that helps developers build dynamic and interactive user interfaces; and Node.js, a JavaScript runtime environment.
MongoDB is a NoSQL (meaning it’s schema-less) database used to store application data. It is the fourth most popular database, chosen by 27.7% of developers in the Stack Overflow survey.
MEAN is a great stack for teams looking to build mobile applications. It’s an end-to-end JavaScript stack, meaning you can use the same programming language throughout and reuse code wherever you like. MEAN is also open-source and free to use.
3. MERN
The MERN stack includes MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js.
MERN is almost identical to MEAN, except it uses React.js instead of Angular.
React.js is an open-source front-end JavaScript library created by Facebook that helps developers build dynamic single-page applications. It is a much more popular choice than Angular.js, used in over 40% of tech stacks compared to just 17.46% for Angular.
It’s also better for developers who want to build dynamic web applications, especially single-page solutions.
4. Serverless Stack
A serverless stack forgoes traditional web servers in favor of cloud providers.
Serverless stacks that use cloud services like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure have become much more popular over the last decade.
AWS Lambda is the most popular option, and it is used by almost 20,000 organizations. Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions are used by around 10,000 companies each.
These technologies are perfect if you want as much flexibility and scalability as possible. Using a serverless stack also streamlines the development process, allowing developers to focus on the code without worrying about the size and state of the back-end infrastructure.
5. Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails (often shortened to Rails) is a dynamic programming environment that significantly simplifies development.
Over 650,000 companies use Ruby on Rails, and the software has a 3.9% market share. That includes major tech companies such as Netflix, GitHub, and AirBnB.
Ruby is a back-end programming language designed for productivity and simplicity. On the front-end side, Ruby on Rails structures web pages using HTML. Database choices can be fluid in ROR stacks, but PostgreSQL is popular.
Rails is an application framework that promotes “convention over configuration,” negating the need for repetitive coding and accelerating development as a result.
Understand tech stacks to better manage product teams
Understanding the tech stack your team needs makes it a lot easier to build processes that make your team more efficient.
You’ll also be better placed to find applications and other technologies that support your product’s underlying technologies, whether that’s a localization and translation management API or a SaaS product.
