How To Know If The Migration Worked

Not by uptime.

The platform has been up for three months, and uptime is the thing you will be tempted to point at, because it is the thing with a number. The dashboard is green. The error rate is boring. Checkout converts. Somebody on the team has a graph that goes up and to the right, and it is a real graph, and it is measuring the wrong thing. Uptime tells you the technology migration worked. The technology migration was always going to be the easy half—we told you that at the start, and you have spent the rest of the book finding out how right we were. The question is not whether the platform is alive. The question is whether you are different. So here is how you actually know, none of which fits on a dashboard:

• Not by uptime. (We are repeating ourselves. It is that important.)
• Not by feature parity—you reached parity the day you stopped counting features, and the migration that chases parity to the last checkbox is the one that never ends.
• Not by the marketing announcement, which went out on schedule, looked great, and described a project that was already over by the time anyone read it.
• By whether the organization is operating differently than it was the week before launch—whether the homepage can change without a ticket, whether the campaign can ship without a meeting.
• By whether the next platform fight is a smaller one. There will be a next fight. If it is about a feature instead of about the platform, you won. If it is about the platform again, you moved your problems; you did not solve them.
• By the absence of the people who were going to leave anyway, who have now left, and by the presence of the ones you were afraid you’d lose, who stayed because the work got better instead of worse.
• By the CFO asking about something else. Not asking less. Asking about something else entirely—the next storefront, the next market, the next thing the business might do now that it is no longer holding its breath. The day his question stops being how is the migration going and starts being what could we do next is the day the migration ended, and nobody will have told him, and he will not have noticed, and that is exactly correct.

That is the whole test. It has no number on it. Three months ago you would have wanted a number. The fact that you no longer need one is, itself, the last item on the list.

Launch was the beginning. You are far enough past it now to feel the truth of that in your hands rather than read it on a page, and the book has said it enough times that you could finish the sentence yourself, which is the only kind of lesson that ever actually takes.

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Here lies a migration. It launched on time. It is still on the same Slack channel.