A rebuild is never finished, only started. Technical rebuilds are doomed to fail.

We've rebuilt Culture Amp's second largest product - Performance. It came in as a Series A acquisition 5 years ago and has thousands of customers today with the largest one at 77k users. Against conventional wisdom, we rebuilt it from the ground up with an aggressive timeline. The underlying model was outdated, slow to iterate on, and not extensible. The monoliths were riddled with tech debt, tightly coupled, patched and band-aided over many times, and couldn’t take us towards the $3b global Performance market we're targeting.

That wasn't challenging enough already so I also used this opportunity to rebuild our engineering culture. Setting a high bar for engineering standards, ways of working, and hoping to improve engagement as we went.

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.

I don't have all the answers (or any!). But we've learned much – what to do, what not to do, and where the spiders are hiding.

One does not simply... rebuild a product

Prakriti Mateti