How the Right Tech Stack Fuels Innovation – The Innovation Engine, Episode 148

On this episode of The Innovation Engine podcast, we take a look at how choosing the right tech stack can fuel innovation in your company. We’ll talk about why the technology your company uses matter, what the most successful product teams do to ensure the work they’re doing has an impact, and how to avoid shiny-new-toy syndrome when it comes to adding additional tools to your tech stack.

Our guest on this episode is Latif Nanji, the co-founder and CEO of Roadmunk, a road-mapping enterprise SaaS platform that serves thousands of product innovators. Roadmunk’s customers include Amazon, The New York Times, Nike, Coca-Cola, Bloomberg, Adobe, and Citibank. Prior to Roadmunk, Latif was a senior product manager at Miovision Technologies and the co-founder and CFO of Pokerspace.com.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

You can tune in to the full episode of the podcast interview with Latif Nanji below.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

Why is it important to find the right tech stack to fuel innovation? A few key thoughts from the episode:

• Latif believes that innovation can be turned into a repeatable process, if you provide your teams with the proper set of resources, like the right tech stack.
• When Latif talks about a tech stack to fuel innovation, what are some of the tools or services actually in that stack? We’re not talking coding languages, at least in the terms of this podcast. We’re talking business applications like ClientSuccess, HubSpot, Salesforce, Xero, ChartMogul, Chargebee, Slack, Intercom, Superhuman, CleanMyMac, and 15Five – so quite a variety of tools.
• “The number of startups that have been successful, as a percentage of history, has relatively been the same, which means that your tech stack isn’t necessarily correlated with success. What it has actually opened up is for the number of startups, in total, in absolute terms, to have the opportunity to be bootstrapped; to start, and innovate ideas. And so, on absolute terms, there’s more successful companies, today, than there were 10 years ago.”
• It’s really important to think about the tech stack in relation to where the business is going to be in a few years, or in some cases, five or 10.
• Roadmunk does something unique: they have a full-time product manager who handles these internal tools. Why? “Being able to operate an entire set of tools means you learn how the entire business operates, right at the ground level; even lower than some of those teams actually even know themselves,” Latif says. “That, to me, is just such a powerful position.” That person also reduces so much of the stress of other teams, because there’s someone in there that can help them solve problems in those tools.

Related Resources:

Learn more at https://roadmunk.com/
Connect with Latif: LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium
Listen to Roadmunk’s Podcast: Product to Product
Read Latif’s article: “How poker helps you win at product management”

About The Innovation Engine

Since 2014, 3Pillar has published The Innovation Engine, a podcast that sees a wide range of innovation experts come on to discuss topics that include technology, leadership, and company culture. You can download and subscribe to The Innovation Engine on Apple Podcasts. You can also tune in via the podcast’s home on Spotify to listen online, via Android or iOS, or on any device supporting a mobile browser.