Do you really need to hire a software architect to lead your team and get your projects on track? I hate to break it to you, but you can’t always out-hire your internal inefficiencies. Fortunately, your existing team can do more, faster, without the added payroll expense of a full-time software architect.
Instead of spending 90 days (or more) finding, hiring, and onboarding a software architect in one of the most expensive labor markets in history, spend that time getting your software product to market by teaming up with Modularis and letting us do the heavy lifting.
Why Would I Want to Hire a Software Architect?
Consider the reasons you might want to hire a software architect in the first place:
- You have more work to do than people; development velocity is too low.
- You recognize a gap in technical leadership; you need someone to lead the team.
When a software development team is left to their own devices, they will always find a way to be extremely busy doing things that seem extremely important. Unfortunately, those tasks may not be moving the revenue needle or providing the business value that your customers need. It’s time to take a deeper dive.
If your development velocity is low, do you understand why?
If you think you need additional resources, in this case a software architect, I’m guessing you have more work than people AND you need someone to better organize that work. Perhaps you’ve recognized some internal process is broken, or you’re facing a bold new challenge to move in a different direction, and realize you don’t have the talent in place to do what needs to be done.
Both reasons, development velocity and the leadership gap, boil down to a team that can’t produce what you need quickly enough. The need for speed is the primary driving factor for these types of hiring decisions; you need to speed up development or right the ship and fix things.
Software architects make an average of $139,876 per year in the United States. Add overhead, like benefits to that salary cost and you’ll quickly see how expensive it is to hire a software architect. Is that the right investment for your company?
Why are you hiring? Because development velocity is low and slow or the machine is broken.
Is hiring the right solution? Not always.
Hiring a Software Architect vs. Hiring Modularis
A software architect brings three big benefits to your software product development, but adding that role to your staff isn’t the only way to get what you need. Using PlatformPlus® and your existing team, your team can get unstuck faster and increase dev velocity 200-500%.
Great Planning Abilities
A software architect can help plan, envision, and model the software product.
Modularis & PlatformPlus® will align your software product development with your overall business goals and help your team get their product to market in as little as 12 weeks. In fact, Step 2 of the plan is two weeks focused on solution architecture, product modeling and design, and developing an estimated schedule for product delivery you can believe in. This plan will allow you to effortlessly plan, envision, and model your product to alleviate your pain and move your team forward.
Advanced Skill Set
Hiring a software architect brings in an advanced, expert skill set that your company’s current developers don’t have.
PlatformPlus® will provide you with automation, prebuilt components, and advanced AI, along with fractional access to a team of seasoned software architects and heavy-lift engineers to support you when your project requires skills that your existing team doesn’t possess. Modularis and PlatformPlus® will fill in the gaps with no extra hiring or overhead required.
Collaboration
A software architect can increase collaboration on the team and serve as a bridge from the developers to the C-suite.
PlatformPlus® will supercharge your productivity with heavy-lift engineers and architects to support your team, along with implementers who bring 20+ years of experience to the table. Technical leadership and our executive advisory team will provide guidance and support while working closely with your existing team to implement PlatformPlus® and work toward a market-ready product release that serves your business goals.
The talent you need to solve the problems you are facing in software development doesn’t come from a single brain. Hiring one person, no matter how good they are, isn’t going to do the job.
Whether you’re launching an all-new software product or undertaking a difficult software modernization, it’s important to align your people, your processes, and your technology with your business goals in order to get your product to market before the market moves on.
Why Won’t Hiring a Software Architect Help?
There are certain risks in hiring a new engineer or software architect. If your team is spending time on things that don’t have business impact, you might see a nominal increase in output, but NOT the outcomes you need.
If you aren’t sure about the business impact of hiring a software architect, try this exercise: create a list of features and functions, things that your organization is trying to build. Next to each item, identify the business impact of that feature/function, which could be:
- Revenue Generation
- Cost Reduction
- Customer Retention/Risk Mitigation
- Anything Else (continuous improvement, what makes a product better, it doesn’t fall into other categories)
You will find that close to 80% of the features you analyze will end up being continuous improvement. You have to ask yourself, is it worth hiring an architect for continuous improvement projects that have no business impact?
Software architects are incredibly hard to find, and the best architects fill the gap between the business and engineering teams. They are able to help the business choose to do things that have an impact.
But it is important to realize that there’s no certification body for the role of a software architect. You can’t guarantee that the solutions they build for you will be built right, built fast, or built to last. Any complex system can either be:
- Under-architected: overly simple, not flexible, and/or not good enough to deliver results.
- Over-architected: looks wonderful on paper, but takes 3-4 times the amount of resources, time, and budget to execute and deliver, with no net tangible value.
How Does Modularis Help?
We take a holistic approach; it’s our job to deliver maximum speed, quality, and longevity out of any product we’re involved with. We don’t believe in throwaway software. When you engage with us, we validate your business vision FIRST. We build a strategic product roadmap as part of our product design review to make sure every milestone for the software engineering team is directly linked to a business milestone defined by leadership.
We use a model-driven approach to help us capture the essential design for your product or platform and automate up to 80% of its construction, while simultaneously making sure it’s built right and built to last.
One of our core values is to take ownership. When we engage with a client, we always work as a single unified team for their benefit. There is no Us vs. You – it’s our unified team vs. the problem. We share all of our knowledge openly to help your developers grow and build a deep sense of mutual trust and respect.
We are ONE team, and we’re in this together. We don’t know how to work any other way.
How Can PlatformPlus® and Modularis Engineers Fill the Gaps?
In terms of increasing development velocity and getting more horsepower, PlatformPlus® reduces development effort up to 80% by itself. It doesn’t make sense for most companies to hire the kind of heavy-lift engineers we have, since you generally only need them for a few weeks at a time. Modularis gives you access to these skilled engineers only when you need them.
Similarly, when it comes to software architects, you need the talent at the right time during the development process. You generally don’t need to hire a full-time software architect, so PlatformPlus® comes with fractional access to one of our highly skilled, pragmatic and experienced architects.
PlatformPlus® provides you access to advanced acceleration technology and access to senior leadership and architects on an as-needed basis to help fill any leadership and technology gaps that may exist. Our team teaches your team everything they need to know–it’s part of our culture to share our knowledge freely and teach you how to fish.
The result is that your existing team becomes more efficient and more capable in the long run. PlatformPlus® is one-stop shopping to fill ALL the gaps.
Why Is Modularis More Efficient Than Hiring?
Right now, software development probably feels slow for your company. It probably feels like it’s dragging you down or holding you back. If you have a team of five engineers, what is adding one more going to do for you? At most you may increase development velocity by 20%, and that’s a best-case scenario.
With PlatformPlus® and the Modularis approach, you can improve development velocity by up to 80% in a realistic scenario, and it costs you the same. You reduce risk and exposure by avoiding the new hire and save thousands of dollars in overhead. You also gain an entire team of people you can lean on in the long term to make sure you’ve got it right, and you can continue to increase velocity even more over time.
How Much Return Do You Want? 20% or 80%, Take Your Pick.
Doesn’t it at least make sense to take a look at this approach? Your existing team can do more, faster, without the added payroll expenses of a full-time software architect. The powerful automation and prebuilt components waiting for your team in PlatformPlus® will rev up your software development in weeks – not months.