Staff-level impact and technical strategy · Expert · Lesson 95 of 98 · about 5 hours
Leading large migrations
After this you can plan a migration across many teams so that it actually finishes: de-risk, enable, and then finish.
Why it matters
Migrations are the main way large systems pay down technical debt, and most of them stall at 80 percent. Larson's pattern is three phases: de-risk (test the approach on the hardest cases first), enable (make migrating as close to automatic as possible with tooling and documentation), and finish (the last 20 percent, which needs explicit ownership and sometimes doing it yourself). Trap: announcing a migration and expecting teams to prioritise it. Make it cheap for them first.
How to use this resource
The clearest guide to running migrations that finish. No video treatment comes close.