You’re not supposed to rebuild from scratch, where’s the fun
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in that? Come hear about how I did one against conventional wisdom and what I learnt. It’s the best or worst decision I ever made.
“A rebuild is never finished, only started”
“Technical rebuilds are doomed to fail”
“It takes 3 times as long as you expect to rewrite a system”
We’re rebuilding Culture Amp’s second largest product – Performance. It came in as a Series A acquisition in 2019 and has thousands of customers today. Against conventional wisdom, we’re rebuilding it from the ground up with an aggressive timeline. The underlying model is outdated, slow to iterate on, and not extensible. The monoliths are riddled with tech debt, tightly coupled, patched and band-aided over many times, and won’t take us towards the $3b global Performance market we’re targeting.
That wasn’t challenging enough already so I’m also using this opportunity to rebuild our engineering culture. Setting a high bar for engineering standards, ways of working, and hoping to improve engagement as we go.
In this talk, I’ll share:
– How I came to this decision
– How we got buy in from Exec and the Board for a purely technical rebuild
– How we tried to set up for success, our principles and standards
– Where we failed
– Where we succeeded
– Lessons that could be useful for anyone thinking about rebuilding a product that’s hampering speed and hindering your ability to innovate or deliver value to your customers.
The rebuild is still in progress. I don’t have all the answers (or any!). But we’ve already learned much – what to do, what not to do, and where the spiders are hiding.
Key Takeaways
- Deciding when a rebuild can be the right choice, including when not to do it
- A framework or steps to set a rebuild up for success
- Lessons on what worked and didn’t work well via our case study
