Posts Tagged ‘CatMorris’
[KCDUK2024] From Greenfield Dreams to Brownfield Realities: Navigating Platform Development
Cat Morris, a product manager at Snyk, delivered a thought-provoking session at KCDUK2024, exploring the challenges of building platforms in brownfield environments. Drawing from her extensive experience in legacy modernization, Cat challenged the audience to rethink traditional approaches to platform development. Her talk, rich with insights from psychology and practical strategies, offered a roadmap for transforming existing systems into robust, user-adopted platforms, emphasizing the importance of trust, ownership, and user-centric design.
The Brownfield Reality
Cat introduced the concept of brownfield development, borrowed from civil engineering, where new projects are built amidst existing, often hazardous, structures. In software, brownfield describes developing new systems alongside legacy applications, a reality for most platform teams. Unlike greenfield projects, which start from scratch, brownfield environments inherit constraints and complexities. Cat’s experience at BT, government agencies, and Thoughtworks underscored that platforms rarely begin with a clean slate; they emerge from existing engineering teams’ workflows, making adoption a significant challenge.
Her story of a neo-bank transitioning from a crypto wallet to a regulated entity illustrated this. Initially, her team built a greenfield platform to address compliance needs, only to find that existing teams preferred their familiar, albeit imperfect, processes. This resistance led Cat to a key realization: platforms are inherently brownfield and emergent, evolving from common pain points rather than imposed solutions. Understanding this shift is critical for building platforms that resonate with users.
Psychological Barriers to Adoption
Cat leveraged psychological principles to explain user resistance. Prospect theory, from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, suggests people prefer certain outcomes over risky, potentially higher-reward alternatives. In platform development, this translates to teams sticking with familiar processes despite a new platform’s benefits. Cat advocated focusing on a “job to be done” framework, ensuring platforms enable users to complete specific tasks end-to-end, reducing perceived risk and encouraging adoption.
The endowment effect further complicates adoption, as users value their existing systems—however flawed—because they “own” them. Cat shared how pairing with a team at the neo-bank, integrating their needs into the platform, fostered a sense of ownership. This collaboration turned skeptics into advocates, driving near-100% adoption within six months. By involving users in design, platform teams can transfer this sense of ownership, making the new system feel like a natural extension of their workflow.
Building Trust for Long-Term Success
Trust, Cat emphasized, is the linchpin of platform adoption. Drawing on trust repair research, she highlighted how trust, once broken, is difficult to restore fully. A platform outage or failure can erode user confidence, requiring significant effort to rebuild. To avoid this, Cat recommended transparent roadmaps, high-quality monitoring to preempt issues, and consistent experiences through tools like fleet management. Her anecdote about her cat, Opal, illustrated this vividly: failing to reward Opal’s tricks broke trust, requiring weeks to restore, a lesson applicable to platform users.
Cat’s strategies—focusing on user outcomes, fostering ownership, and prioritizing trust—offer a blueprint for navigating brownfield challenges. By building platforms alongside users, incorporating familiar elements, and pacing changes to match user workflows, teams can overcome resistance and drive adoption. Her call to action urged platform engineers to embrace these principles, ensuring platforms are not just functional but trusted and valued by their users.