01 / PLATFORM MODERNIZATION
Rebuilding a legacy platform from 0→1
Cardata was moving further into enterprise, but its legacy platform had accumulated years of complexity and wasn't built for where the business needed to go next. I led the product work from strategic discovery through a customer-validated MVP in under six months.
THE PROBLEM
There wasn't one customer complaint that triggered the project. It was a pattern. Through customer conversations, onboarding, late-stage sales, competitive research and work with Product Marketing, we kept seeing the same theme: integrations were becoming increasingly important. Prospects wanted them. New customers wanted them. Existing customers wanted them.
At the same time, the platform had accumulated years of product and technical debt. New capabilities had been added over time, but the underlying experience had never received the same kind of rethink. That was becoming increasingly at odds with where the business wanted to go.
Legacy Experience
Fragmented pages, manual onboarding, tangled navigation and support dependency.
What the Business Really Needed
As Cardata moved further into enterprise, the platform needed to support more integrations, more complex customer environments and a foundation that could evolve with newer technologies, including AI.
THE QUESTION WE NEEDED TO ANSWER
What did the product need to become for the next stage of the business?
THE EVIDENCE
This wasn't a hunch. The signal was showing up everywhere we looked.
Individually, any one of these could be dismissed as noise. Together, they pointed at the same underlying constraint: the platform's foundation wasn't built for the level of complexity the business was now asking it to support.
Key Decision
Don't treat the legacy product as the specification.
Option A: Recreate the legacy
- Familiar to users, but rebuilds the same complexity
- Slower to deliver real improvement
- Higher ongoing cost to maintain
Option B: Start from the workflow
- More discovery upfront, but built for what's next
- Addresses the actual constraint, not the symptom
Why: Modernization creates a dangerous temptation: "while we're rebuilding it, let's fix everything." One of the easiest mistakes in a rebuild is treating the existing product as the spec. If we'd simply asked users which features to recreate, we'd have rebuilt much of the complexity we were trying to remove.
WHAT I DID
Start with the workflow, not the old product
I worked with administrators, customer teams, people running reimbursement programs, prospects and internal teams to understand what people were actually trying to accomplish, not which screens they clicked through.
MVP SCOPE
The first version focused on three things. Everything else had to earn its way in.
THE TRADE-OFF
What Changed
WHAT I LEARNED
Customers can become experts at navigating complexity. That doesn't mean the complexity is valuable. Sometimes modernization is less about deciding what to build next and more about deciding what no longer deserves to exist.