Managing Long-Term Products in a Short-Term World
Our low-code digitalisation platform is approaching two decades in age. Over that time, it has continuously grown, accumulating lines of code, complexity, and features. Some of these features are still in line with our vision, others are no longer. Some of these features are used broadly and loved by our customers, others failed and never got adopted. Some are cheap to maintain, others hurt our quality, upgradability, or simply have high maintenance costs. I will talk about the challenges of keeping a B2B platform competitive and maintainable in a constantly shifting environment. I will explain how we manage to evolve gracefully, and remain at the forefront of technology, while also dealing with a large installed client base that runs their business application on our platform and thus requires careful management of feature deprecation and removal. And I’ll even explain how we manage do all of this in a way that actually makes us money.