Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey
Summary
Lots of legacy enterprise product suites are being re-platformed to become updated SaaS offerings and offer richer, responsive, device agnostic experiences. While the benefits of such initiatives are many for the business and their customers, it also comes wrought with many major challenges in strategy, technology, time to market and managing change and disruption for the existing customer base. This talk will present a case study and 10 learnings from a 4-year long re-platforming journey of UKG Ready, a HCM product suite. As we follow the journey, we will also learn from UX strategy and contributions at each stage.
Key Insights
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Legacy enterprise applications often persist due to high risk and complexity despite technology advances.
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Re-platforming on the cloud varies from simple re-hosting to full refactoring and requires tailoring to business goals.
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UX teams need to evolve from embedded roles to centralized, strategic influencers in re-platforming projects.
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Focusing too narrowly on one persona, such as end users, risks neglecting important power users and administrators.
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A blended approach combining visual refreshes and incremental re-platforming can ease transitions but requires careful consistency.
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Designing for change includes not just usability but also product consumability like adoption speed and time to value.
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Robust change management addresses both external customers and internal teams to align rationale and reduce resistance.
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Initial customer resistance to change is natural and may mask genuine pain points, requiring feedback at scale with qualitative and quantitative data.
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Hyper-focus on individual features or modules can cause loss of peripheral vision, leading to fragmented experience and customer frustration.
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Maintaining team morale during long, complex transformations is critical for sustained success and delivering customer value.
Notable Quotes
"Legacy applications linger because changing them is risk-ridden and a major undertaking."
"No two re-platforming journeys are exactly the same, and there isn't one single formula that works every time."
"We did a blended approach with a visual refresh first to minimize differences between old and new and buy time."
"We neglected our power users during the responsive, one-size-fits-all strategy, and it really hurt us."
"Re-platforming is transformative not just for the product but also for the people, teams, and organization."
"There is no solid way to control the course of your re-platforming project; being flexible is essential."
"The curse of hyper-focus means you lose peripheral vision and miss the larger context and customer needs."
"Designing for change means focusing on learnability and product consumability, not just ease of use."
"Managing resistance is mental; customers might resist because they've learned workarounds with legacy systems."
"Keep a pulse on your team morale because re-platforming journeys can either enrich or burn out your people."
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