Buy or build your next tool? A quick guide.
6 key questions that will help you decide.
Tool consolidation · 6 min read
Questions we'll cover
- What are your needs?
- When does it need to go live?
- What are the upfront costs?
- What are the ongoing maintenance costs if you build?
- What are the incentives in your organization?
- Are you being (brutally) honest with yourself?
Frame your decision.
Once you answer the following set of questions you will hopefully have a much clearer picture of your best course of action.What are your needs?
The critical first step and where we think every organization should start. Firmly establishing your company’s unique pain points and goals can act as a home base where you can return for guidance as you go through the rest of the process. If you’re considering Coda for example, you might be interested in faster execution through automation of certain tasks, building a single source of truth or creating more efficient team processes that reduce duplication work. The key is making sure you clearly identify your needs so you can see which option best meets them.When does it need to go live?
Is this something required within days, week, months, or even years? If considering a third party, what’s their dedication to getting you up and running to meet that timeframe? Things to consider for building:- Incorrect estimations: This can be an issue especially in cases where you’re building in unfamiliar territory.
- Outside events you can’t control: You can do your best to plan, but if something like a reorg hits, it can blow up your team’s entire process.
- Internal churn: Whereas third parties will have redundancies, internal builds are sometimes run by a small subset of people (or even a single person) who contain a lot of institutional knowledge. If they leave, it can throw off development, or if already launched, make the product difficult or even impossible to use. Scenarios we’ve had relayed to us more than a few times by customers.
What are the upfront costs?
If you’re purchasing a new tool, financial cost is going to be one of the primary considerations, but resource costs should also be taken into account. Do you have the team members to build the tool or might you need to shuffle teams, or even hire new ones? What’s the consequence of pulling someone off a major project to do this? This can play into the timeframe question above.“What started out as a very simple buildout, ended up becoming a very complex thing to maintain and engineers were not happy. They did not want to work on it, they did not want to continue to iterate and maintain this...we also went through a huge rebranding exercise which required months and months of updates to our assets when it could have been weeks if we had bought the email software.”