Summary
Scaling an organization or even just a product, inevitably means dealing with your legacy. Through both they and their colleagues' extensive experience with legacy modernization work, Meaghan and Fotina found one consistent theme. View legacy modernization as purely an engineering effort and the outcome won’t be what you want. Legacy modernization needs to be designed. It needs to fit into an overall product strategy and examined through the same lenses of customer, business, and tech impact as anything else. Otherwise you’re just immediately building a new legacy, not something that can scale with you.
Key Insights
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Legacy modernization failures often stem from neglecting product thinking focusing on outcomes, vision, and experimentation.
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The 'four faces of doom' in legacy modernization are hubris, distraction, timidity, and overcapitalization.
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A balanced discovery approach blending upfront and continuous discovery uncovers legacy complexities and prevents feature parity traps.
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Spending too much upfront discovery delays value delivery and risks locking in wrong assumptions.
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Shared visual knowledge like customer journey maps and ecosystem blueprints is crucial to managing legacy complexity and aligning teams.
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Digital tools like Miro facilitate inclusive visual mapping, replacing physical walls but retaining wider team visibility.
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Partnering with a pragmatic yet innovative product manager ensures a clear vision and allows early value delivery in modernization.
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Flipping strategies prematurely or without referencing vision wastes resources and leads to half-baked products with little value.
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Change management is integral and continuous across discovery, delivery, and adoption phases, not just training or announcements.
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Investing about 30% of analysis and design effort in change management supports adoption by addressing awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.
Notable Quotes
"Almost all the negative outcomes in legacy modernization trace back to not applying product thinking focused on value, vision, and experimentation."
"Hubris is the belief you know the best approach and that the market will wait for your big bang release."
"We once saw an organization running 52 projects with only 36 teams — a perfect example of distraction."
"Lift and shift or feature parity is the hallmark of timidity, clinging to what is known rather than delivering real value."
"Legacy modernization needs a mix of upfront and continuous discovery because many details are known but hidden."
"If you skip detailed discovery upfront, you'll only get a superficial understanding and may prove critical assumptions wrong."
"Shared visual maps record what has gone before and allow you to explore with more confidence through complexity."
"Strong product managers avoid flip-flopping by referencing back to a clear vision and prototyping changes before pivots."
"Change management is not linear; it cycles through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement alongside build-measure-learn."
"Allocate about 30% of your analysis and design effort to change management to help people embrace the new systems."
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