Telco SaaS Development Methods To Help You Conquer Technical Debt

In our earlier article, we covered the costs of technical debt and its causes.

To summarize:

But understanding the root causes of technical debt is only the first step. 

To break free from the cycle, telcos need the right strategy and the right software. A successful strategy starts with clarity. You’ll need a sharp, shared understanding of your company’s situation and the market you’re in before we can consider the software requirements.

This principle of being clear about what we should solve guides our approach to telco software-as-a-service (SaaS) development here at Circles. Before any code is written or systems are replaced, there needs to be a clear definition of the problem the software needs to solve and an in-depth understanding of the market to ensure that any solution built is scalable and delivers real business value.

In this next section, we’ll share the telco SaaS development approach that we use to minimize technical debt, from shaping the right problem statements to building adaptable, market-ready solutions through Agile and full-stack design.

Making Your Strategy Crystal Clear

Before your telco begins thinking about replatforming or replacing legacy systems, it helps to take a step back and crystalize the core business problem you’re trying to solve. This means moving beyond feature requests and digging into what the business truly needs to grow, differentiate, or operate more efficiently.

As Robin Langdon, our platform evangelist puts it:

“Traditional telcos, such as the ones that have been around for two decades or more, have built up really complex sets of IT systems and architectures and processes.

When these traditional telcos are looking to replace these systems, they send out a request for proposal with thousands of requirements based on how they operate today. This is counterproductive because they ask their software vendors to replicate what they have today, but they expect a different result and expect better outcomes.

Essentially, what we’re saying is don’t go and replicate the software that you are using today. Discard your old software and processes and do an outside-in transformation.

Create a brand new digital approach to your software and then start migrating people across to your new stack.”

In consulting, nothing should be taken at face value, and crystallizing your understanding of your current situation by asking the right questions can help your telco win half the battle. 

This logic extends to software development. That is why the first step to the software development process should be discovery and industry landscape research.

The goal of the discovery step is to gain an in-depth understanding of your telco’s situation and the true nature of the problem that you need to solve. This includes investigating underlying issues that your telco could be facing like technical debt, business level decisions that led to today’s issues, or a shift in the workflow or the journey.

The next step is market analysis. A proper understanding of the market is why Gojek succeeded in Indonesia’s rideshare market while Uber lost.¹

Gojek is Indonesia’s go-to super app. It incorporates everyday services like ride-sharing, deliveries (groceries, prescription medication, etc.), a payment app, and an eclectic mix of other services like massage therapy, house cleaning, truck rental, roadside auto repair and more. 

Uber, on the other hand, seemed to take a more unified approach to launching its overseas operations meaning that it used the same approach that worked in Western markets without focusing on localizing it to its newer markets.³

Uber failed to localize its services in time. They initially did not allow cash payments, which made their service inaccessible to many people who do not have credit cards. Uber also failed to expand its ride-hailing to more popular modes of transportation, like motorcycles and ‘Ojeks’- Indonesian motorcycle taxis, which were embraced by competitors Gojek and Grab.

Uber also chose not to adapt to the local political systems and transportation policies in each country. They exhibited monopolistic behaviour, used unregistered drivers, and didn’t adapt to safety and security measures. These all resulted in huge fines for Uber.

On top of all that, Uber took a hostile stance towards local taxis and transport providers, which their competitors embraced. This led to a lot of protests against Uber from thousands of Indonesian taxi drivers.⁴

All these issues coupled with competition from savvier and more localised competitors contributed to Uber’s eventual exit from Indonesia.

What telcos can take away from Uber and Gojek’s story is that a unified approach may not be appropriate when expanding to countries you are unfamiliar with. For example, small neighborhood shops in rural villages still play a role in serving some nations’ telco customers, although some prefer the security provided by authorised resellers.

Failing to understand the ins-and-outs of your market and supplying them with a blanket solution could lead to failure.

If you are working with a telco software-as-a-service provider, you will also get additional benefits that bespoke software projects cannot provide. When telco SaaS providers who serve clients in multiple geographies solve a problem for one client, all their clients benefit from the update.

Strong telco SaaS providers take a global, data-driven approach to product updates. They analyze feedback and performance reports across all client deployments to identify common issues and trends. From there, the product team prioritizes updates based on their potential impact by focusing on solutions that benefit the greatest number of clients. This ensures every customer benefits from up-to-date software improvements grounded in global insights, delivered in a scalable and efficient way.

Last but not least the business value that the software must bring must be factored into the software project’s requirements. 

The projects must be tied to objectives like improving the customer journey to improve customer loyalty, enhance average revenue per user (ARPU), enhance configurability so that fewer engineering hours are needed to launch services and digital brands, and more.

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Agile Methodologies Provides Software Development Speed and Flexibility

With how quickly markets change, the software development models that you use need to keep up. Nothing explains the idea behind Agile methodologies better than their manifesto:⁵

Agile methodologies provide an MVP-based (Minimum Viable Product) approach that allows teams to ship quickly, gather real-world feedback, and improve iteratively. 

Agile allows telcos to focus on the business requirements and improvise based on changes to the business requirements over a period of time. For example, if a capability has five requirements, the agile model allows telcos to make adjustments to each requirement as needed. 

This is different from the Waterfall model which requires the prior requirement to be finalised before moving onto the next requirement. 

Waterfall methodologies on their own do not cause technical debt, but can become problematic when implemented wrongly. They are suitable for projects that require stability and security while having well defined requirements that are not likely to change in the near future. 

However, this requires committing to a massive, multi-year roadmap with no room to adapt to market changes nor for testing and gathering feedback - which can lead to software that is already outdated even before it has launched.

Adopting Agile approaches lets you prioritize building requirements that serve today’s needs, be flexible enough to adapt to market changes, and start creating revenue as fast as possible.

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Adopting Agile Best Practices Throughout the Organization

A tool is only as useful as the person using it. 

Software, people, and processes go hand-in-hand so it’s important to upgrade the way your team works alongside your software improvements. This keeps your telco faster, more resilient, and customer-centric.

As a telco SaaS partner and operator of our digital mobile operator brand ourselves we also strive to be agile by adopting the best organizational practices of the day. While there’s no universal blueprint for which practices to adopt, we would like to share a few of the ones that help our teams move fast without sacrificing stability or quality.

To show what that looks like in action, we asked our Chief Technology Officer, Kannan Alagappan, to share more:

“As part of adopting world-class engineering practices, we cultivate a culture of excellence, agility, and continuous innovation here at Circles.

We embrace a DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) mindset, ensuring automation, continuous deployment, and real-time monitoring are at the heart of our operations. This allows us to move fast while maintaining reliability at scale.

Another key aspect is our data-driven decision-making. We leverage AI and machine learning across our platform to optimize performance, enhance user experiences, and ensure proactive issue resolution.

Most importantly, we foster a culture of engineering excellence—where teams have the freedom to experiment, fail fast, and learn faster. We invest heavily in talent development, open-source contributions, and cross-functional collaboration, ensuring our engineers are always ahead of the curve.”

To celebrate digital first and encourage innovation mindsets, Circles also has monthly AI and Innovation Awards to encourage people to adopt new innovations to optimize and enhance their work.

In short, Circles adopts practices that focus on data-driven decision making, encouraging flexible and scalable mindsets, and cultivating an environment that encourages innovation and experimentation.

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Moving from Patchwork Systems to Configurable Full-stack Software

The sluggishness and bloat caused by years of spaghetti integrations can be solved by shifting to greenfield software solutions.

One option for greenfield software are pre-integrated full-stack software solutions. Instead of adding new modules - more noodles to the spaghetti - telcos that use these full-stack solutions will not have to retain any legacy software nor the outdated processes that come with them.

Our CTO, Kannan Alagappan adds:

“One of the primary challenges we faced was how to provide telcos with the agility they need in a rapidly evolving market. Traditional telco models require multiple disparate systems that operate in silos, leading to inefficiencies and slow time-to-market. 

We developed a cloud-native, API-first platform to replace these legacy ecosystems entirely, giving your telco a seamless, integrated solution that allows them to launch and scale digital brands faster and smarter. 

By unifying everything under one platform, such as your core network, billing, CRM, customer experience, and partner management, we’ve simplified and accelerated the way telcos operate.”

If you choose to work with a vendor, consider one that has everything pre-integrated with a high level of configurability. This means the software already factors in the majority of scenarios, such as launching campaigns or services, and can be configured directly by marketing or product managers without needing to send in new engineering team tickets.

Our CTO Kannan Alagappan further adds:

“When telcos embed customer-centricity into every phase of the product development process, from design process to implementation, you can create a solution that doesn’t just meet technical demands but also creates tangible impact on your day-to-day operations.

As engineers, we can do that by constantly asking ourselves ‘How can we make this easier for our customers?’ 

For example, we should design software platforms with intuitive interfaces and self-service capabilities, so your telco doesn’t have to rely on complex technical teams to get the most out of it. This empowers your telco teams to move quickly, innovate independently, and better serve your customers.” 

This ties back to what was mentioned about solving a real business need. Achieving this level of configurability for these decision makers reduces the load on your developers while speeding up updates and product launches. 

Microservices Architecture: The Engine Behind Scalable Telco Software

Scalable software and infrastructure are vital when growing your userbase. You will need greater workload capacity to support your growing userbase while having the flexibility and adaptability to launch updates with minimal service downtime.

For workload capacity, whether on-premises or in the cloud, you need to factor in horizontal scalability (adding more servers) and vertical scalability (upgrading the hardware directly) while considering how to minimize downtime during these upgrades. Using third-party cloud servers allows your telco to quickly add more capacity without needing to stop the system to upgrade your physical infrastructure.

When it comes to the ability to respond quickly to market changes, launch new services across geographies, and integrate emerging technologies a lot depends on the foundation of your software architecture.

This is why telcos are beginning to shift to a microservices architecture which is linearly and horizontally scalable.

Rather than relying on tightly coupled monolithic integrations with multiple different software providers, microservices involves dividing your platform into smaller, modular services which are each responsible for a specific capability. 

This approach provides greater flexibility, fault isolation, and the ability to scale individual services independently, based on usage or market needs without impacting the overall platform. On Circles’ end, we deploy our microservices architecture through Kubernetes to make us deployment agnostic, be it deploying to the cloud or on-premises. 

Telcos who employ microservices architecture can roll out new updates, services and digital brands without overhauling their existing infrastructure each time. In today’s market with rapidly evolving AI capabilities and 5G/6G rollouts, being able to rapidly incorporate these developments into your software is key. 

Combined with a fully distributed, cloud-native infrastructure design that incorporates APIs, this architecture allows for fast, iterative innovation. It enables teams to deploy new features in weeks instead of months and update individual components without bringing the entire system down.

In short, microservices give telcos the agility to scale, the stability to support millions of users, and the confidence to stay ahead no matter how fast the industry moves.

The Clean Slate Approach in Telco Software Development

Hard-coded bespoke solutions slow down your telco. To speed up your telco’s digital transformation, you can also consider using full-stack software solutions that cover everything from B/OSS to data analytics and martech stacks.

Business Benefits of a Clean Slate Approach

While we can’t speak for other vendors, with Circles, your telco will achieve:

You can find more about these results from our Middle East case study.

Legacy technical debt doesn’t have to define your future. With Circles’ full-stack, clean slate telco SaaS platform, telcos can modernize with speed, scalability, and confidence.

This isn't just a technology upgrade. It's a fundamental shift in how telcos operate—free from legacy constraints and built for digital growth.

Ready to break free from the past? Let's build the future together.