A “tech-stack” refers to the list of technology an organization uses to achieve their goals. For example, a company’s email provider and could storage solutions may come from Google, but their creative products may come from Adobe, and their customer relationship management may be Salesforce. When viewed in totality, the company’s tech-stack would be Google, Adobe, and Salesforce, which would have all been decided on for various reasons.
While sheer functionality is a core aspect of a tech-stack, cross platform modality is often just as important. It’s not helpful if your email provider is barred from taking to your CRM platform, or if your creative tools can’t easily export files that need to be hosted on the cloud. Thinking about the technology we use in terms of a “stack” is helpful because in doing so we stop making all problems appear as nails. When the stack approach is adopted we accept the limitations of our solutions and begin to search for a more viable path forward. What’s more, when we stack our solutions on top of each other we ensure they collaborate to create a rich and robust solution-forward ecosystem.
Notably, the concept of tech-stacks or “stacks” in general aren’t reserved solely for corporations. Anyone can create a stack, anyone can outline for themselves a list of opinionated-tools that, when viewed in totality create comprehensive solutions for a wide array of issues. In our personal lives maybe our stacks are less about content creation, website maintenance, and internal and external communication and more about cooking, gardening, home improvement, or gaming. In each case, the goal is to find solutions that both expertly solve a narrow subset of problems and are able to collaborate with its peers.
Regardless of the problem we trying to solve, or even if we buy into the concept of “thinking in terms of stacks” vying for solutions that collude rather than compete is how we get from where we are, to where we want to be without leaving anything valuable on the table.