Very short talk about product management, legacy systems and etc...

1. Cleaning Up Legacy
Creating fit and configurable platform
Nikolay Novozhilov
nik@wego.com
www.novozhilov.co

2. Legacy…
Typical situation for a start-up who “survived” A
and B rounds of financing:
• No refactoring – ship as fast as you can
• Employees churn - a lot of code is “a black
box”…in PHP
• Current product was build on top of the old
one during the last pivot
• Data is stored in several databases…one of
them is human-copypaste-machine

3. …what do we do?
• Old API, new API, API for the product that
doesn’t exist anymore…
• JIRA is full of bugs and no time for new
features
• More developers close more bugs and
introduce more new ones
Let’s “redesign” everything!

4. What is wrong with re-design? (1)

5. What is wrong with re-design? (2)
• Every time you change CTO you end-up with
re-design
• Real need, not just migration from Java to
Scala or from MySQL to Mongo

6. What is wrong with re-design? (3)

7. What is wrong with re-design?
• “Lets try building a new thing
from scratch and move there”.
Bad approach!
• Old code is result of long
experience
• A good spec is better than
commented code. It answers
the question why we did it this
way and what else we tried.

8. Sharpen the axe
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first
four sharpening the axe
Abraham Lincoln
• Stop bug fixing. Good
solution has priority over
fast solution
• What about super-urgent
bugs? They are not!
• Everything is negotiable

9. Divide and Conquer
• Separate and rewrite
one by one…
• Divide by functions,
not systems
• Gravitation law:
Front-end is easy,
database is hard

10. Warranty
• Fix one area (with all
bugs included) and
put a warranty on it
• Move everybody to
new system and fix
all bugs real-time
• Then do the next
piece

11. INSIDE ONE BRICK

12. Don’t ask the user…
• No surveys
• Observations are
everything!

13. “Give me final requirements…”
• You don’t know everything upfront, so what is the
choice?
– Ask for maximum you could imagine
– Ask for minimum you need
• No matter what you choose - you end up asking
what can’t be done at all
• Platform thinking. If you found what feature to add
don’t just add! Make process of adding simple!!!
• How to sell it – “we never come to you again”

14. Hit the user fast
• MVP is good. But you can do faster.
• Fake the solution!
• First goal is research, not final design
• For internal products – make developer
explain to users

15. Shipped is not done
• Not done after
deployment. Maybe 50%
done.
• LR effect tracking. How
many of your A/B tests
were good only for the 1st
week?

16. DONE!
• Stop bug fixing
• Divide and Conquer
• Fix one area and put a warranty on it
• Don’t ask the user
• Platform thinking, not “final requirements”
• Hit the user fast
• Shipped is not done