How to Evaluate Your Technology Stack (Even If You're Not Technical)

Non-technical founders can evaluate their technology stack by measuring platform reliability, checking whether the team can deliver new features without constant rebuilds, assessing whether finding developers is difficult, and calculating total technology costs against revenue. You don't need to understand the code, you need to understand whether your technology supports or blocks business growth.

Your developers say the technology stack is "outdated" and needs a £120,000 rebuild. Or they claim it's "cutting-edge" and perfect. You've no way to evaluate whether they're right.

This puts you in an impossible position. Approve the rebuild and you might waste £120,000. Reject it and you might hamstring your business with inadequate technology.

Most technology evaluations require deep technical knowledge. This guide doesn't. It shows you how to assess your technology stack using business metrics and observable outcomes, no coding knowledge required.

What is a technology stack and why does it matter?

Your technology stack is the combination of programming languages, frameworks, databases, and infrastructure that your product is built on. Think of it like the foundation and materials of a building, customers don't see it, but it determines how easily you can expand, how reliable the building is, and how much maintenance costs.

Why it matters:

A good technology stack lets you ship features quickly, handles growth without constant changes, and allows you to hire developers easily. A poor stack does the opposite, features take months, the platform breaks under load, and finding developers is impossible.

The business impact:

• Manchester e-commerce company: Built on a niche framework. Couldn't find developers, took 18 months to add features competitors shipped in 6 weeks. Lost market position, eventually spent £200,000 rebuilding.
• Birmingham SaaS startup: Used mainstream, well-supported technology. Hired developers easily, shipped features weekly, scaled to 10x revenue without major technical changes.

Same market, different technology choices, completely different business outcomes.

The five questions that evaluate any technology stack

Question 1: Can your platform handle 5x growth without major changes?

What you're evaluating: Whether your technology can scale with your business or will require expensive rebuilds when you grow.

How to assess this (without technical knowledge):

Ask your technical team: "If we got 5x more customers tomorrow, what would break and how much would it cost to fix?"

Good answer sounds like: "We'd need to upgrade our database tier (£500/month more) and add more server capacity (£2,000/month). Total cost to handle 5x growth: £30,000 in development time plus £2,500/month ongoing."

Bad answer sounds like: "We'd need to completely rebuild our database layer, implement caching, and probably move to microservices. That's 6-9 months of work, maybe £150,000."

Follow-up question: "When did you last test this? Have we load-tested our platform?"

If they've never tested whether the platform can handle increased load, they're guessing about scalability, and guesses are often wrong.

Red flag: Vague answers like "it should be fine" or "we'll deal with that when we get there." Scalability problems cost £50,000-200,000 to fix under pressure. Preventing them costs £10,000-30,000.

Question 2: How often do things break in production?

What you're evaluating: Platform reliability and whether your technology is stable or fragile.

How to assess this:

Look at the last 3 months and count:

• Customer-impacting incidents (errors, downtime, data issues)
• Emergency fixes required outside normal working hours
• Features that had to be rolled back due to problems
• "We need to fix this immediately" moments

Good benchmark:

• Mature platform: 0-2 customer-impacting incidents per month
• Growing platform: 2-5 incidents per month
• Problem platform: 8+ incidents per month, or multiple emergencies weekly

Manchester logistics company example: They had 12 customer-impacting incidents in one month, requiring developers to work weekends fixing problems. This indicated their technology was unreliable and poorly tested.

After tracking incidents for 3 months, they identified the platform was fundamentally unstable and needed rebuilding. Cost of continuing: £15,000/month in emergency fixes. Cost of rebuild: £80,000 one-time. Rebuild paid for itself in 6 months.

Questions to ask your team:

• "How many customer-impacting bugs did we have last month?"
• "How often are developers firefighting vs building new features?"
• "What percentage of development time goes to fixing problems vs shipping new things?"

Red flag: More than 30% of development time spent on emergency fixes rather than planned work.

Question 3: How long do "simple" features take to build?

What you're evaluating: Developer productivity and whether your codebase is maintainable or filled with technical debt.

How to assess this:

Pick three recent "simple" features, things like adding a field to a form, creating a new report, or changing business logic.

Ask: "How long did this take from decision to deployed?"

Good benchmark:

• Simple feature: 2-5 days
• Medium complexity: 1-2 weeks
• Complex feature: 3-6 weeks

Bad benchmark:

• Simple features taking 3+ weeks
• Every feature described as "more complex than expected"
• Constantly hearing "we need to refactor X before we can build Y"

Birmingham SaaS example: Adding a new field to their customer form took 6 weeks. Why? The codebase was so tangled that changing anything required changes in 15 different files, each change risking breaking something else.

This indicated severe technical debt. They could either:

• Continue slowly (each simple feature taking weeks)
• Spend £60,000 refactoring to improve development speed
• Rebuild the worst parts (£40,000)

They chose targeted rebuilding of the worst areas, recovering development speed within 3 months.

Questions to ask your team:

• "Why did this simple feature take 4 weeks?"
• "How much of the time was actual building vs working around technical limitations?"
• "Is the codebase getting easier or harder to work with over time?"

Listen for: If developers constantly say they need to "refactor before we can build X," your technology stack has significant technical debt.

Question 4: How difficult is it to hire developers for your stack?

What you're evaluating: Whether your technology choices make hiring easy or impossible.

How to assess this:

Post a job advert for developers with your specific technology requirements. Count:

• Applications received in first week
• Percentage of applicants with relevant experience
• Salary expectations vs market rate
• Time to hire

Good benchmark:

• 15+ qualified applications per role
• 50%+ have direct experience with your technologies
• Salary expectations match market rate
• Hire within 4-8 weeks

Bad benchmark:

• Fewer than 5 applications per role
• Almost no applicants have experience with your specific stack
• Need to pay 20-30% above market rate
• Takes 4+ months to hire, or can't hire at all

Real example: A London FinTech built their platform in a niche functional programming language. Developer jobs got 2-3 applications over 3 months, none qualified. They had to pay 40% above market rate and train developers from scratch.

Alternative: Mainstream technology stack would have gotten 30+ applications in a week at standard market rates.

Cost impact: Difficult hiring means:

• Paying 20-40% premium for developers
• 3-6 month hiring timelines (during which you can't ship features)
• Training costs for developers learning unusual technology
• Risk of losing key developers with no ability to replace them

Questions to ask:

• "How many applications did our last developer job posting get?"
• "How long did it take to hire our last developer?"
• "Are we paying above or below market rate?"

Talk to a recruitment agency. Ask: "How difficult is it to find developers with experience in [your technologies]?" They'll tell you honestly because it affects their ability to fill your roles.

Question 5: What's your total technology cost as percentage of revenue?

What you're evaluating: Whether technology spending is appropriate for your business stage.

How to assess this:

Calculate your total technology costs:

Staff costs:

• Developer salaries (including employer costs)
• Technical contractors or fractional CTO
• CTO or Tech Lead salary

Infrastructure costs:

• Cloud hosting (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
• SaaS tools and APIs
• Database and storage costs

Tools and services:

• Development tools and licences
• Monitoring and security services
• Third-party integrations

Total technology cost ÷ Annual revenue = Technology cost percentage

Good benchmarks:

• Early stage (under £500K revenue): 40-60% (high because you're building)
• Growth stage (£500K-£3M): 25-40%
• Scaling (£3M-£10M): 15-25%
• Mature (£10M+): 10-20%

Red flags:

• Spending 50%+ of revenue on technology after £3M revenue (indicates inefficiency)
• Infrastructure costs growing faster than revenue (indicates scaling problems)
• Rebuilding the same functionality repeatedly (wasted money)

Leeds example: £2M revenue, spending £900,000/year on technology (45%). Investigation showed:

• £200,000 wasted on overlapping SaaS tools
• Infrastructure over-provisioned (paying for capacity not using)
• Three developers spending 60% time on maintenance vs new features

Optimising technology stack reduced costs to £600,000 (30% of revenue), saving £300,000 annually whilst improving productivity.

The technology stack health scorecard

Rate your technology stack on these five factors:

Scalability: Can handle 5x growth without major rebuild?

• Yes, with minor upgrades (2 points)
• Needs significant work but possible (1 point)
• Would require complete rebuild (0 points)

Reliability: Customer-impacting incidents per month?

• 0-2 incidents (2 points)
• 3-5 incidents (1 point)
• 6+ incidents (0 points)

Productivity: Simple features take how long?

• 2-5 days (2 points)
• 1-2 weeks (1 point)
• 3+ weeks (0 points)

Hiring: How difficult is hiring developers?

• Easy, many qualified candidates (2 points)
• Moderate difficulty, some candidates (1 point)
• Very difficult, few/no candidates (0 points)

Cost efficiency: Technology costs as % of revenue appropriate for stage?

• Yes, within benchmarks (2 points)
• Slightly high but manageable (1 point)
• Significantly above benchmarks (0 points)

Score interpretation:

• 8-10 points: Your technology stack is in good shape. Focus on continuous improvement.
• 5-7 points: Some areas need attention. Prioritise fixing the weakest areas.
• 0-4 points: Significant problems. You need strategic technical leadership to address these issues before they cost serious money.

Common technology stack problems and what they cost

Problem: Built on outdated or niche technology

Symptoms:

• Can't find developers with relevant experience
• Developers demand premium salaries
• Security updates no longer available
• Third-party integrations don't support your stack

Business impact: £50,000-100,000/year in premium salaries, plus inability to ship features quickly.

Solution cost: £80,000-200,000 to migrate to modern, mainstream technology.

Problem: Over-engineered for current business stage

Symptoms:

• Using enterprise technology designed for companies 100x your size
• Complex microservices architecture with 5-person team
• Infrastructure costs growing faster than revenue
• Simple changes require updates to multiple systems

Business impact: 2-3x higher infrastructure costs, slower feature development.

Solution cost: £40,000-100,000 to simplify architecture.

Problem: Under-engineered for current scale

Symptoms:

• Platform regularly falls over under normal load
• Can't handle expected growth without complete rebuild
• Built as "prototype" or "MVP" but now handling production traffic

Business impact: Lost revenue from downtime, inability to take on larger clients.

Solution cost: £60,000-150,000 to rebuild with proper architecture.

Problem: Accumulated technical debt

Symptoms:

• Every change takes 3x longer than it should
• High bug rate, constant emergency fixes
• Developers say "we need to refactor before we can add features"

Business impact: 50% reduction in development productivity.

Solution cost: £40,000-120,000 to address critical technical debt.

What to do based on your evaluation

Score 8-10: Technology stack is healthy

Actions:

• Continue regular investment in improvements
• Keep technology choices current
• Monitor for emerging problems
• Consider fractional CTO for quarterly reviews (£2,000-3,000/quarter)

Don't: Make major changes just because new technology exists. "If it's not broken, don't fix it" applies.

Score 5-7: Some problems that need addressing

Actions:

• Identify the weakest areas (reliability, hiring, cost)
• Get expert assessment of what needs to change
• Budget £30,000-80,000 for targeted improvements
• Engage fractional CTO to prioritise and guide fixes (£5,000-8,000/month for 3-6 months)

Don't: Panic and approve a complete rebuild. Targeted improvements usually solve the problems for 30-50% of rebuild costs.

Score 0-4: Significant problems requiring strategic attention

Actions:

• Get comprehensive technology stack audit (£5,000-10,000)
• Understand whether to fix, partially rebuild, or completely rebuild
• Budget £80,000-200,000 for major technical work
• Hire fractional CTO to lead technology strategy (£6,000-10,000/month)

Don't: Let developers decide without business input. Technical teams often recommend rebuilding when targeted fixes would work, or delay necessary rebuilds because they're daunting.

Questions to ask your development team

Use these questions to dig deeper into your technology stack health:

About the technology:

• "What would you change about our technology stack if you could?"
• "What parts of the codebase do you avoid working on, and why?"
• "If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?"

About productivity:

• "What percentage of your time goes to new features vs fixing problems?"
• "What slows you down most when building new features?"
• "How much of each week is spent on unplanned work (bugs, emergencies)?"

About scalability:

• "What breaks first when we get more customers?"
• "What's the maximum load our platform can handle?"
• "When did we last test scalability, and what did we learn?"

About the future:

• "What technology investments would have biggest business impact?"
• "What technical problems will cost us money if we don't address them?"
• "If we 10x revenue, what needs to change technically?"

Listen to these answers carefully. Good developers will give you specific, honest feedback. If they're vague or say "everything's fine," they either don't understand the problems or aren't comfortable sharing honestly.

When to get external assessment

Get expert technology stack assessment if:

• You scored 5 or below on the health scorecard
• Your team wants a £50,000+ rebuild and you can't evaluate if it's necessary
• You're about to scale significantly (5x+ growth)
• You're raising investment and investors are asking technical questions
• Hiring technical leadership and want to understand what you're hiring them into

What a proper assessment includes:

• Review of architecture, code quality, infrastructure
• Scalability testing and risk identification
• Comparison to industry best practices
• Specific recommendations with costs and priorities
• Technology roadmap for next 12-24 months

UK market cost: £5,000-15,000 depending on complexity.

ROI: A good assessment prevents £100,000+ in wrong technical decisions. A Birmingham company spent £8,000 on assessment, discovered their planned £140,000 rebuild was unnecessary, and fixed the actual problems for £35,000.

This is a core CTO responsibility, learn what else CTOs should do

Making your decision

You've evaluated your technology stack using business metrics. Now you need to decide what to do.

If everything's working: Don't change it. Technology doesn't need to be "modern" if it delivers business results reliably.

If you've identified problems: Get expert assessment before approving major spending. Don't let developers decide alone, they optimise for technical elegance, not business outcomes.

If you're unsure: That uncertainty is costing you money through delayed decisions. Spend £5,000-10,000 getting clarity rather than making uninformed decisions about £100,000+ investments.

Understand fractional CTO costs for getting this expertise

Book a free 30-minute call to discuss your technology stack. We'll review your answers to these questions, identify your biggest risks, and recommend whether you need a detailed assessment or can address issues with targeted fixes.

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About the Author

Jake Holmes has worked with 15+ UK businesses (£1-10M revenue) on technology leadership decisions. He's helped companies decide between fractional and full-time CTOs, recruited technical leaders, and prevented £100,000+ in bad hiring decisions. Before founding Grow Fast, Jake was a software engineer and technical lead, giving him the technical depth most consultants lack.

Connect: jake@grow-fast.co.uk | LinkedIn | Book consultation

About Grow Fast

Grow Fast helps UK businesses (£1-10M revenue) make smart technology decisions without wasting money. Our Fractional CTO services provide strategic technical leadership 2-5 days per month, saving you £200,000+ vs hiring full-time whilst getting the expertise you actually need. Book a free 30-minute call to discuss your technical leadership needs.