We had the luxury of years of prior experience within the company of building mobile game backends so we had a very good idea of what the access patterns would

We had the luxury of years of prior experience within the company of building mobile game backends so we had a very good idea of what the access patterns would be. That said, the new product we were building the backend for was filled to the brim with "social" features that presented new scalability and performance concerns. I was able to justify the existence of a small dedicated backend team by claiming I could deliver 10x the performance at 1/10th the cost of our most popular game's backend. Given that the monthly server costs of that game could be measured in multiple engineer salaries, this proposition was quite attractive. While definitely a bit of hyperbole, we actually ended up hitting those targets when it was all said and done.