Challenges and issues in managing SaaS engineering teams for e-commerce

Challenges and Issues in Managing SaaS Engineering Teams for E-Commerce
In the SaaS sector, developing a solution often mirrors the growth stages of a startup: it begins with creating features for a small group of clients. As the user base grows, new needs emerge, presenting a dual challenge: adapting the functional architecture to support this expansion while continuing to innovate, all while managing the increased technical complexity arising from the growing number of users and requests.

In this context, optimizing time-to-market is crucial to remain competitive in a dynamic field like e-commerce. Quickly addressing user needs and maintaining platform availability while continuously improving it is a constant challenge for engineering teams. This requires a strategic approach and tailored tools to maximize the value delivered at every stage of evolution.
 
This balance largely hinges on a strong DevOps culture—a set of practices and principles designed to ensure fluidity, resilience, and efficiency in product development and infrastructure management.

I - The DevOps culture

1. Automation and Continuous Improvement

Automation is a cornerstone of the DevOps culture. For infrastructure, automation supports both the deployment of necessary resources (virtual machines, load balancers, etc.) and system monitoring tools, enabling proactive interventions through user experience-centered observability. Sensefuel adopts an "infrastructure as code" (IaC) approach, where every element is managed via versioned code, making infrastructure redeployments as flexible as application updates. Tools like Terraform simplify this process with a declarative approach, ensuring consistency across development, testing, and production environments.

Simultaneously, continuous improvement optimizes processes and reinforces stability over time, enabling constant adaptation to user needs and technical demands.

2. Raising Team Awareness of SaaS Challenges

In a SaaS environment, every member of the development team must understand the product's challenges, from user needs to resilience and stability requirements. Developers use rigorous testing practices and proven design models to ensure reliability and performance. Regular dissemination of market and product performance information, along with frequent interaction with Customer Success Managers (CSMs), helps align technical decisions with real user needs.

The DevOps culture shares many similarities with Lean IT, particularly its pragmatism, which prioritizes simple, effective solutions. This approach minimizes over-engineering, promotes relevant developments, and reduces waste by optimizing resources.

Finally, increased collaboration between Ops and developers ensures consistent efforts, facilitating the seamless integration of features into the shared infrastructure. Developers now share production responsibilities with Ops, breaking long-standing silos to form a unified team.

II - Software Architecture

Software architecture plays a critical role in the speed and flexibility of development. A modular structure that allows parts of the product to change or evolve without impacting the whole is essential for meeting market expectations with agility. A microservices-based approach is particularly effective for optimizing time-to-market, although it presents challenges in terms of observability and maintenance. Our team is currently redefining component boundaries based on production experience to ensure a robust and efficient architecture.

III – SaaS and Cloud Solutions

As a SaaS provider, Sensefuel also relies on cloud solutions to increase speed and agility. Rather than reducing costs, the cloud is a strategic investment that allows us to outsource the management of complex infrastructure. For example, a solution like Cloud Run simplifies network and infrastructure constraints, allowing our team to focus on innovating and developing new features instead of managing heavy technical aspects.

IV - Software Maintenance

Software maintenance is a critical, dual-faceted task—both technical and human. What is often referred to as "technical debt"—a term sometimes overused—can be compared to maintaining a garden. Updates, new libraries, and evolving practices require regularly revisiting the code for refactoring to ensure its readability, maintainability, and adaptability to future developments. While these efforts may not deliver immediate visible results, they are essential for ensuring sustainable product quality and avoiding the accumulation of technical issues.

Managing an engineering team in a SaaS and e-commerce environment requires balancing rapid innovation, technical flexibility, and long-term quality maintenance. A strong DevOps culture, modular architecture, and agile cloud solutions are critical to meeting these challenges and achieving sustainable performance.