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
-
•
Four common pitfalls of legacy modernization are hubris, distraction, timidity, and over-capitalization.
-
•
A blend of upfront and continuous discovery balances the need to understand existing systems with the agility to adapt plans.
-
•
Visual mapping of features, journeys, and ecosystems is crucial to manage legacy complexity and align stakeholders.
-
•
Strong product management must be both pragmatic and innovative to avoid flip-flopping strategies and deliver early value.
-
•
Change management is a continuous, integral process from research through release, not just announcements or training.
-
•
About 30% additional effort in analysis and design should be budgeted for effective change management.
-
•
Legacy system complexity demands designing at the feature, product, and ecosystem levels simultaneously.
-
•
Avoid big bang releases by slicing modernization into smaller releases for faster learning and value delivery.
-
•
Product managers should actively validate shifts in market needs and avoid merely replicating legacy features.
-
•
Change management cycles should align with the product build-measure-learn process to reinforce adoption.
Notable Quotes
"All negative outcomes in legacy modernization can be traced back to not bringing product thinking to the table."
"Hubris is that belief the market will wait for your big bang release—executives have lost jobs over this."
"We’ve seen organizations try to run 52 projects with only 36 teams—distraction at its worst."
"Lift and shift equals timidity—it’s sticking to what you know rather than delivering real value."
"Avoid too much upfront discovery that delays value and traps you into a fixed plan."
"Maps stop you from getting lost in legacy complexity and keep everyone aligned on what’s important."
"If everyone’s looking at different versions of the plan, you get frustration and confusion."
"A pragmatic product manager decides on strategy and roadmap clarity; flip-flopping kills momentum."
"Change management is not just announcements—it starts with user research and goes through to release and beyond."
"Allocate about 30% of your analysis and design effort to change management for successful adoption."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If you can get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry at any time."
Billy CarlsonIdeation tips for Product Managers
December 6, 2022
"Apple really premiered mobile accessibility in a very exciting way with the iPhone 3GS and VoiceOver."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
November 17, 2022
"Enterprise problems are often engineering problems as much as design problems."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
May 13, 2015
"Expressing gratitude publicly and privately gives people a sense of purpose and acknowledges their contributions."
Michael PolivkaScaling Design through Relationship Maps
November 7, 2017
"Trying to map all possible connotations and context in language is mind-bogglingly computationally expensive."
Karen McGrane Jeff EatonAI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?
November 21, 2024
"Ratios always start on the premise of spreading people too thin, which is not a great way to get success."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"If you find someone not following values, start with a one-on-one to understand their point of view and realign together."
Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee XiongA Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
September 8, 2022
"Design ops is not just about design; if we aren’t considering the system, then we’re destined to fail."
Jacqui Frey Alison RandSetting the Table for Dynamic Change
October 24, 2019
"If you think about things this way, that’s when you actually become the CEO of the experience."
How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"
June 15, 2018
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
Why are traditional linear journey maps insufficient for representing complex human ecosystems?
How can visualization techniques be used during workshops to manage complexity without too much polish?
What role does visualizing funding distributions (like 'sausage' diagrams) play in improving portfolio management?