Product StrategyEmerging Pattern
Invest in painful rewrites when they unlock long-term scale and capabilities
Insight from Cameron Adams
When to use
When making product scope and feature decisions
Don't do this
Over-engineering or adding unnecessary complexity
2 Founders Who Did This
1
Canvaby Cameron Adams
Invest in painful rewrites when they unlock long-term scale. Canva rewrote their entire editor codebase, freezing new features for two years. Though painful, it enabled real-time collaboration and scalability to hundreds of millions of users.
Result:Applied by Cameron Adams at Canva
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lemlistby Guillaume Moubeche
When architecture became unstable after rapid early growth and co-founder departures, Guillaume invested 18 months in full infrastructure rewrite
Result:Rebuilt scalable foundation that supported growth from $10M to $40M ARR
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