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World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

The Migration Cookbook

Robert Lehmann

Software migrations fail for the same social reasons historical empires collapse. Discover why aligning team incentives is the real secret to a painless technical transition.

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#1 about 8 min

Learning from historical change management failures

How top-down forced changes without stakeholder input lead to massive rollbacks.

#2 about 4 min

Analyzing legacy product use cases before starting

Determining what goals users actually accomplish with a legacy tool rather than mapping exact features.

#3 about 2 min

Stopping new usage of the legacy product

How to halt the creation of new users or access tokens to stop the legacy user base from growing.

#4 about 4 min

Staffing and incentivizing internal migration teams

Assigning the same team to own both the legacy and new systems aligns incentives for completing the transfer.

#5 about 5 min

Communicating migration plans clearly and specifically

Using repeated messaging, designated figureheads, and tailored impact reports for leadership helps ease user transitions.

#6 about 3 min

Executing targeted segment migrations over big bangs

Breaking rollouts into small groups allows for independent rollbacks and continuous partial successes.

#7 about 2 min

Preparing canned support responses for edge cases

Equipping support teams with prepared answers for edge cases proves more effective than relying on documentation alone.

#8 about 3 min

Maintaining backward compatibility using simple shims

Preserving legacy URLs through simple rewrite components avoids frustrating users with broken internal links.

#9 about 1 min

Handling straggler teams that avoid migrating

Threatening to transfer legacy product ownership and pager duty effectively motivates the final holdout clients.

#10 about 1 min

Celebrating milestones to build migration champions

Highlighting successful segments builds trust and creates champions for subsequent rollout phases.

#11 about 2 min

Recognizing the social realities of technical migrations

Why clear communication and stakeholder management often outweigh purely technical execution challenges.

#12 about 2 min

Prioritizing difficult migration segments using objective scoring

Using numeric scoring based on complexity or blockers helps schedule the rollout of deeply complex migration phases.

Matching moments

2:11 min

Executing massive cloud network migrations while maintaining live systems

Dana Lawson Dana Lawson +1 · WWC Europe 2026

5:12 min

Addressing runtime migration specifics and future open source framework ambitions

Max Fischer Max Fischer +1 · WWC Europe 2026

4:02 min

Overcoming the perceived expense of major system migrations

Stefan Priebsch · WWC 2021

3:56 min

Acknowledging the inevitability of software evolution and technology migrations

Luisa Rink Luisa Rink +1 · WWC Europe 2026

1:49 min

Transforming legacy platforms to cloud native patterns

Kai Geißelhardt +1 · WWC 2022

3:56 min

Summary of migration steps and building team consensus

Phil Nash · WWC 2023

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