Migrations

How to manage complex engineering initiatives

Managing Migrations

Engineering projects that are either directly technology migrations or shaped like them are exceedingly common, so learning to do them well is an important skill as an engineering leader. These projects tend to generate a lot of detail-oriented work and often lack the glamour of shipping product features. Connecting the importance of migrations to business impact and demonstrating their value can be a challenge. Supporting teams through these projects can be even harder. In this post, I’ll cover some framing techniques and tools I learned to make migrations more successful, their business case clearer and also talk about supporting teams and individuals through them.

Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt

Migrations are the only mechanism to effectively manage technical debt as your company and code grows. If you don’t get effective at software and system migrations, you’ll end up languishing in technical debt. (And still have to do one later anyway, it’s just that it’ll probably be a full rewrite.)