The Missing Tech Manual - The non-technical founder's tech guide

This book is aimed at non-technical people who want to start their own s or people already running a tech business. It'll also be useful for people who want to learn tech to get a job in the industry.

In this book I will go over the following topics:

Understanding the technology. 

Here I will go through Programming languages, databases, hosting options, and testing methodologies. For each of these, I will explain what kinds there are and then go through the major options for each stating which kind it is, then stating the common use cases for that option, and provide a pro-con list. Then I will discuss serverless, no code, and the differences between a monolith application and microservices explaining when it’s best to use each and when to avoid them.

A Tech Team

During this part of the book, I will explain the different roles within IT what each role does, the levels of seniority of each role, and what each role is responsible for. I’ll also discuss recruiting. How you can go through each stage of the recruitment process, describing what should happen, the good and bad things to look out for, and how long the stage should last for. Then I will discuss the onboarding process and how long it should take.

Phases

Here I will discuss the difference in IT in the three main stages a company goes through. Startup, Growth, and Scale. I’ll explain the things you should see, the problems that occur, the goals, and what should be acceptable at each stage.

Software Development Methodologies

Here I will explain the various processes with software development. Stating what waterfall is. Explaining the agile principles and then going through some of the agile frameworks explaining how they work. I will pay special attention to the Scrum framework as it’s the most popular and I’ll go through each of the meetings how they should run and what the key outputs for them should be. I will explain the Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), what it is, who should do it, and what the key outputs should be. Then I will discuss Domain Driven Development (DDD), what it really means and the basics of the process. And finally, I will explain what Test Driven Development (TDD) is. 

Tickets

I will explain the different kinds of tickets there are. Feature-wise, an idea, a feature request, and a feature demand. Then there are the obvious bug tickets. I will explain how to create a feature request that will help reduce time wastage on developers building the wrong thing or questions getting asked late in the stage that results in redoing the ticket from scratch. And how to write a bug ticket so the developer can understand what went wrong and what the fix is. 

Troubleshooting the IT Department

I will go through some of the major issues normally seen within IT departments around the world. How to truly understand if you have a problem or not. 

I will discuss developer churn, a problem where a developer doesn’t stay at the company for a long period of time, why this is a major problem, what the signs are, and what the possible causes and solutions are. 

Then I will move on to the topic of estimations and deadlines. I will explain the many problems with estimations the possible fixes. As well as, discussing the other causes of constantly overrunning deadlines.

The next topic of discussion is when your system is suffering lots of problems and downtime. I will discuss what is normal and what is abnormal technical issues for a website to experience.

Suggestions

And finally, I will go through the suggestions I would have for the early seed stage companies IT departments, the funded stage and then the growth stage. My suggestions for staffing numbers, hosting technologies, software methodologies, etc.

Once it’s all over, I hope that you will have the knowledge to be able to not only understand what IT is doing but make informed decisions on if that is truly the right direction for your company.

Not knowing the tech fundamentals could cost you everything!

Building a tech product when you're non-technical can be scary. You don't know what you don't know. Time and again, non-technical founders end up on the wrong end of technical decisions because they didn't have someone unbiased giving them technical insights. The Missing Tech Manual solves this by explaining the basics of tech.

Learn what tech is good at what so can understand your tech stack!

Relying on freelancers to pick your tech stack will only result in you using the tech stack your freelancer likes. You should have a good understanding of what sort of tech stack you should want to use then find a freelancer that uses that stack. No point in building websites on tech designed to build hardware devices.