The Perils of Product Re-Platforming

The Release Train at Re-Platform 9¾ (Years Until It’s Complete)

If there’s one word that sends shivers up the spine of any product person (as well as most of the rest of the organisation), it’s RE-PLATFORM. What does that mean? Well, here’s my definition:

Re-platform (verb): To spend months or years migrating software from one technology stack or infrastructure to another, at much expense, to provide a system that looks and feels functionally identical to the original.

Wait, that sounds rubbish! Why would we do that?

Why products need to be re-platformed

There are a number of reasons why you might need to re-platform your product and, in many ways, you could anticipate that the likelihood of needing to do this tends to 1 over time. This is because software is complicated, products involve trade-offs and, quite frankly, technology changes over time. I like to group the reasons into three broad categories, which intersect:

Technical reasons: Stuff written in old programming languages, or using out-of-date libraries. Legacy…