1  Method before tools

With a SaaS, you don’t ship software and walk away: you keep it running, secure, and evolving every day, for customers who rely on it. That takes method in seven areas, and most of the management problems in a small team are about agreements between people, not about tools.

1.1 The seven areas

Area	The question it answers	Chapter
Work	What do we do now, who does it, what comes next?	3, 4
Code	How does a change get into the product without breaking anything?	7
Delivery	How does code reach production in a repeatable way?	9, 10
Operations	Is it up? When it goes down, how does it come back?	11, 12, 13
Security	Is customer data protected?	14
Documentation	Can someone new understand things and decide on their own?	5
People	How does a collaborator join, work, and leave?	6

1.2 The symptom: everything lives in one person’s head

With a single person, these areas run on improvisation. The backlog is a TODO.md, the deploy is a command you know by heart, the database password sits in a text file, and the decisions live in memory.

That works until one of three things happens:

1. A collaborator joins and has to ask about everything.
2. Something breaks at three in the morning and the steps aren’t written down.
3. You come back to a topic after six months and can’t remember why you decided it that way.

This book’s job is to get knowledge out of your head and into the repository, where it is versioned, reviewed, and findable.

1.3 Why not start with the tool

Swapping TODO.md for Jira solves nothing if nobody has agreed on what a finished task is, who prioritizes, and when planning happens. The order that works is:

1. Agree on how the work is done, in one or two pages.
2. Pick the simplest tool that supports that agreement.
3. Write the agreement down where everyone reads it.

For a team that already lives on GitHub, the simplest tool is almost always GitHub itself: Issues and Projects for work, Pull Requests for code, Actions for delivery, and Markdown in the repository for documentation. That is this book’s choice.

1.4 When the tool starts to matter

Heavier tools such as Jira and Confluence start to make sense when the team grows beyond five to eight people, when non-technical people edit documentation every week, or when structured customer support comes in. Chapter 4 covers this tipping point.

TipIn this repository

This book’s working agreement is in CONTRIBUTING.md. It is short on purpose.

NoteTry it

List three things in your project that only you know how to do today. They are the first candidates to become runbooks (Chapter 5).