Rebuild or Revise
How do you know when it’s time to rebuild an old app or just revise it?
Rebuilding an existing application is a massive endeavor. It takes deep technical knowledge, design expertise, and the ability to manage project timelines and stakeholder expectations. When you’re rebuilding an existing application, progress can feel slower. Why? It takes a lot of work just to get the new foundation laid. And users are operating off of a preexisting mental model of functionality. So it takes additional time to surpass the baseline of expectations and start delivering anything new. In order to deliver on time, you need to control the scope, which is considerably more difficult when a solution already exists.
Despite these challenges, rebuilding an existing product gives you a chance to reevaluate, to assess product functionality with a clean slate. It’s the perfect opportunity to streamline your product with your best, most-used features and remove anything nobody uses. While there’s a heavy upfront cost in the rebuild, gains are returned in an app that works better, keeps users engaged, and lets developers work efficiently to build new features.
I like to look at it from three different layers:
- How it looks (design).
- How it functions (functionality).
- How it’s built (technology).
Based on those layers, the thinking is as follows:
- If you don’t like the design, but the functionality and technology are stable, you can revise. Visual updates are often the easiest to implement incrementally.
- If you don’t like the functionality, but the technology is solid, you can strategically revise through targeted feature updates (but still may not be worth it).
- If you don’t like the technology, it’s unlikely the functionality is desirable, either. In that case, it’s best to rebuild and cut your losses.
Overall, the pattern is clear: if there are any deep-seated issues with functionality or technology, rebuilding is likely the better path. Surface-level design changes can usually be handled through revision, but once you start dealing with core functionality or technical debt, the cost-benefit analysis typically points toward rebuilding.
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