July 8th, 2022

TEK Formula & Blueprint: The Ultimate Guide to Building Software

by Robert Golabek in TEK Formula & Blueprint

TEK Formula & Blueprint Overview

Phase 1: Winning Innovation Backbone
• Find Your Tech Partner
• Dedicated Teams – Expert Workforce
• Application Building Journey

Phase 2: Build Your Successful Product Vision and Execution Team
• Product & Development Roadmap
• Build Your Tech Team
• Cloud Native Starter

Phase 3: Build Market Leading Product
• Building World-Class Application (MVP+)
• Agile At Scale
• Support, Maintenance, and Security

TEK Formula & Blueprint: The Ultimate Guide to Building Software

Phase 1: Winning Innovation Backbone

Find Your Tech Partner

As you begin building your application, the first step is finding a trusted technology partner. This is important because it will be the core foundation that you build your application on top of. This is not something that you want to rush or do without careful consideration.

Your technology partner will play a significant role in determining how your application is built, how well it performs, and how easily it will scale as your application grows. You want to make sure that your technology partner is flexible, open to change, and will allow you to scale as necessary in the future. You also want to ensure that the partner is trustworthy and knowledgeable about your industry. You don’t want to worry about whether or not you have the right partner to build your application.

When selecting vendors and technology partners, you want to ensure that they are well vetted and have experience in the industry with a proven and successful track record; it’s also vital that they are committed to the success of your business. To ensure that you are selecting the right vendors and technology partners, you must be transparent and upfront with your vendors. Partnerships are great, but you should be cautious that you are not getting trapped in a contract with a vendor that is not aligned with your goals.

Translucent is a tech partner with an award-winning track record you can trust to architect your solution, build your business vision, and lay the foundation for a long-term relationship that will lead to a scalable platform that meets business demands.

Dedicated Teams – Expert Workforce

Once you’ve found your technology partner, you’ll want to evaluate and understand the benefits of how a dedicated development team fits your organization. A dedicated team focused on software engineering, UX/UI design, product owners, SRE/DevOps, and machine learning allows you to create a well-oiled machine. It helps to improve collaboration within the whole company and minimizes the amount of rework that is necessary.

You must have the right experts for your cloud application journey; by having the right team, you will be able to maximize productivity and efficiency. You also want to ensure that each team has a clear and concise goal for the role they are responsible for. Having dedicated software development teams help create a culture of innovation and success.

The primary focus of a dedicated team is to understand your vision and execute it, allowing team members to excel in the skill that they are best at. This is how to achieve efficiency and productivity as your application grows. TEKTeams provide on-demand access to the top 1% of tech talent with industry-specific experience without the hassle of hiring and maintaining internal teams.

Application Building Journey

Once you’ve chosen your technology partner and gained the understanding and benefits of a dedicated team, it’s time to begin your application-building journey. At a high level, there are three main stages of the application building process:

The discovery phase
The development and iteration phase
Support and security phase

Each of these three phases plays a significant role in building a successful application. Failing to plan out each phase carefully might lead to unforeseeable roadblocks or costly rework.

Translucent has a proven track record of delivering effective systems that generate ongoing commercial success. The app-building journey is based on TEKStack, an open-source production-ready platform built by Translucent that guides you through the complexities of building for the cloud, decreasing your cost by 20-30%.

TEKStack is the culmination of more than 100,000 hours of coding that combines the philosophy of automating everything, DevOps expertise, and best practices with open-source technologies.

Translucent is the leader in the cloud industry because of its continued investment in cloud innovation, which allows them to provide genuine value to its clients. As a trusted partner, Translucent will help you understand how the cloud works and the complexities that come with it.

Phase 2: Build Your Successful Product Vision and Execution Team

Product & Development Roadmap

As you break down the application-building journey, creating a product and development roadmap is essential. This will allow you to validate your product and have a clear plan and vision for the future of your application. It will help you stay focused on what is most important and what is a priority right now.

The product and dev roadmap should outline and include product vision, goals you want to achieve with your application, your target demographics, the features you want to implement, and the timeline for accomplishing each of these things. This will help keep you, and your team focused and motivated.

You want to break down each stage into agile releases and identify unknowns. Creating a culture of innovation and iterative development will allow you to create an action plan for building the right product. You’ll be able to deal with any issues that may arise and prevent potential roadblocks.

The engineering team should have a clear idea of what they are building to deliver it on time. The product and dev roadmap should outline these details and ensure that the product and engineering teams are working closely together and are aligned.

Translucent’s approach to cloud native development, from conception through steady-state and support, is called TEKProcess. This approach makes it easier to organize the entire cloud native development process by aligning business goals and requirements with the right technology and teams. TEKProcess results in a quicker response to customer demands and ongoing development based on user feedback.

Build Your Tech Team

As you build your application, it is essential to consider how to go about building your elite tech team. Disruptive software needs award-winning architects and builders. You want your team to be composed of vetted top tech talent that fits your budget, product vision, and industry-specific experience.

Forming a team with the know-how and the right expertise is an art that reaps the rewards when it comes to product feature delivery. Translucent will build the right team for your project to support the entire application build journey that will hit your timeline, avoid costly rework, and creates an easily scalable application.

Translucent will work with you and your team to construct a thriving environment for all personnel to create top-shelf results. Translucent employs, trains, and educates top tech talent with its proven best practice TEKProcess that promotes an always learning mentality that improves through the life of the engagement.

TEKTeams are your dedicated development teams that matches the project requirements with the right skills needed for successful project delivery.

Cloud Native Starter

There are 100s of open-source projects in the CNCF Cloud Native Landscape covering different parts of the cloud native journey from databases to orchestration to automation to CI/CD. TEKStack platform combines selected projects that cover the entire cloud journey in a production-ready state to kick-start your project. Translucent dev teams work daily on live projects contributing to TEKStack’s continued development and validating its commercial viability.

TEKStack eliminates your upfront investment into cloud native tools and infrastructure; it uncovers the unknowns of the cloud, decreases the cloud complexity, and speeds up the time to market. Your project onboarding is simplified, and project kick-off is accelerated. TEKStack allows you to start developing business features immediately and decrease the project startup costs by 20-30% with a fully automated application infrastructure platform.

Phase 3: Build Market Leading Product

Building World Class Application (MVP+)

Once you are on your way with the cloud native starter and have started actually building your application, it is important to create a set of core values and principles. These core values and principles will help you to remain focused on what is most important while you build your application.

Building world class applications takes time. It takes time to create the right technologies, it takes time to create the right architecture and design, and it takes time to create a valuable product that your customers and users want.

Once you have a minimum viable product or MVP, you can start getting access to the digital economy by attracting early adopters and beta users to validate your application early in the development cycle. Feedback at this stage will help fine-tune and build quality software that helps connect people, businesses, devices, data, & processes.

Agile At Scale

Building world-class applications require time and patience; knowing when to invest and scale is crucial to building marketing-leading products. Once you have proven your MVP+, it’s time to gather feedback, listen to the market needs, start success-driven investment into your platform, and aim for 10x ROI.

Translucent unique scaling model supports your growth with multiple team on-demand scaling model reinforced by top tech talent and process. Working together through analyzing the product success, roadmap, vision, and budget, we onboard new teams that work on new value-based features in parallel.

TEKTeams scaling ability accelerates the speed of feature delivery by staying close to customers and adapting quickly to changing conditions.

Support, Maintenance, and Security

Security should be baked into the software development process from the beginning, and once the application is ready, it is essential to consider ongoing maintenance and support. Maintenance, support, and security are 3 key aspects that are often overlooked but are incredibly important. Having a plan for maintenance and security from the early stages of building your application is vital and helps avoid ransomware attacks.

This will allow you to implement any necessary changes or updates effectively and efficiently. Having the right support in place for your application is also essential. You want to be able to effectively and efficiently troubleshoot issues that arise. Having a plan in place for updating and patching your application when necessary is also crucial.

If a security flaw is discovered in your application, having a plan is critical for patching the application as quickly as possible to protect your users. One of the most important things you can do to protect your application is to ensure you are keeping up with current best practices and industry standards.

Translucent’s TEK Solutions secure critical systems, applications, and data while providing clients enterprise-level security, with clearly defined deliverables for support maintenance and safety.

Why TEK Formula & Blueprint?

What is TEK? TEK (Translucent Expert Knowledge) is our branded suite of cloud native solutions that are designed to guide your project from ideation to steady-state and support, and provide award-winning results for your business. The most successful companies are those that have established a strong foundation. Whether a large enterprise or a small startup, having a solid foundation will give you the ability to scale and grow your business efficiently.

The TEK Formula & Blueprint is that foundation. It takes a holistic look at the entire cloud application journey and how it will impact your business. It lets you plan for the future and gives you a birds-eye view of how everything is connected and affects one another. This blueprint is for software innovation, scalability, and security, providing a road map on how to build award-winning software the right way. If you want to find out if you are building software the right way, get your TEK Formula & Blueprint copy and benchmark your cloud native readiness with our Cloud Native Innovation Scorecard.