Amey-Thakur Paved road adoption
Mandates produce compliance without adoption: teams do the minimum and keep their old setup running. Adoption happens when the paved road is genuinely faster and someone helps with the move.
Method
- Make the paved road clearly better. Faster setup, less maintenance, and better defaults, since teams adopt what helps them rather than what is required (see platform-as-product).
- Do the migration with teams, not to them. Platform engineers doing the first migrations both accelerates adoption and finds the rough edges.
- Migrate a willing team first. An enthusiastic early adopter produces a reference and an advocate; a reluctant one produces a cautionary tale.
- Automate the migration where possible. A tool that converts the old setup removes most of the objection (see integration-migration).
- Publish the deprecation timeline early. Teams plan quarters ahead, and a surprise deadline forces bad work (see api-deprecation).
- Let some teams stay off-road with a reason. Genuine exceptions recorded rather than fought preserve credibility for the rest.
- Track adoption and blockers as a metric. What is stopping the remaining teams is the platform's backlog.
Boundaries
Adoption cannot be forced without damaging trust, and coerced adoption produces minimal compliance. Migration effort is real and belongs in teams' planning. Some legacy systems should not be migrated at all and are better left until replaced.