2 min lesson
Migration without freezing delivery
Talk this through in your own words: "Leadership wants you to unify everyone onto one platform fast and proposes mandating it next quarter. Why might a hard mandate backfire and what would you do instead?" Finish with the next move.
Step 1 of 2
Migration without freezing deliverystrangler, not big-bang
Nobody lets you stop the world to re-platform a product at 1M+ DAU. The strangler pattern is the answer: stand the new platform up alongside the old, route new and willing workloads onto it and let the legacy footprint shrink until it's gone. Teams keep shipping the entire time.
- 1Build the road for one real workload. Onboard a friendly team's actual service end to end. A platform validated on a toy never survives the first real edge case.
- 2Make it the default for the new. Every net-new service starts on the paved road. You stop growing the legacy sprawl before you try to shrink it.
- 3Migrate by carrot, then incentive. Lead with teams that feel the pain; let "free observability and no pipeline to babysit" sell it. Mandate only once the road is clearly better.
- 4Strangle the legacy. Move existing services in waves, deprecate the old paths and delete bespoke per-team infra as each wave clears.
- 5Keep teams shipping throughout. Both paths stay live during the move; no team's delivery stalls so the migration can look tidy.
A mandate before the road is genuinely better breeds shadow infra - teams quietly building around your platform because it slows them down. Win adoption by being the easiest path first. Force it too early and you've created the exact sprawl you set out to kill, now with worse morale.