Leading Technical Migrations - and How to Get Them to "Done"
The hardest type of project is the one where you have to coordinate a bunch of other teams to do work, particularly where that work stops those teams from working on the fun new features they were planning.
If you’re trying to migrate everyone to a new version of your API, or to move them from one platform to another, or even to get them to add security scanning for all of the 1000+ microservices, your problem is at least as much about communication and influence as it is about technology. So how do you do it?
You make sure you are completely clear on what you are doing and why - and the impact and cost of any delays.
You communicate in every way possible until you feel like a broken record.
And you put yourself in your customers' shoes. Here, you can learn from behavioural economics (nudge theory) to increase your chances of getting things done as quickly and painlessly as possible.
My teams at the Financial Times built APIs and tools that were used by lots of other development teams: we faced these challenges all the time. We tried lots of things and I’ll tell you about the ones that worked for us!
