Every product team eventually confronts the same uncomfortable truth: the code they are writing today will become the legacy code someone else has to deal with tomorrow. Legacy is not a failure of the past; it is an inevitability of building software over time. The question is not whether you will have legacy, but how you will handle it when it starts slowing you down.
At PR_D_CT DAY 2023 in Ghent, Andreas Creten, CEO of madewithlove, tackled this head-on with a talk that reframed legacy from a burden into a strategic opportunity. Drawing on years of experience helping companies modernise their software, he walked through what legacy really is, how it gets created, why the instinct to rewrite from scratch almost always backfires, and what practical techniques actually work to keep your product moving forward.
The session resonated with an audience of product managers and engineering leaders who have all inherited codebases they wish they could burn down and rebuild. Instead of giving them permission to do that, Andreas gave them something more valuable: a structured approach to modernisation that keeps the business running while the product evolves.
