Migration Readiness Is A Product Problem
Migration pain is often designed into packaging, docs, and defaults long before a customer ever starts.
Migration work gets framed in a few different ways depending on who is talking.
Sales teams tend to see it as a motion.
Field teams tend to see it as an enablement problem.
Customers tend to see it as risk.
All of that is true, but product teams should take more ownership here than they usually do.
The reason is simple: a lot of migration pain is designed in early.
If the local development loop is slower than the alternative, that matters.
If the packaging model is unfamiliar, that matters.
If the docs assume the reader already understands the platform internals, that matters.
If the migration path depends on five “temporary” workarounds that never got cleaned up, that definitely matters.
This is one reason I like looking at migration readiness as a product quality signal instead of a side program. It forces better questions. Not just “can this workload run here,” but “what would make a reasonable engineer confident enough to move it here without feeling trapped.”
The interesting thing is that migration-readiness work often makes the product better even for users who are not migrating from anywhere. Cleaner defaults, sharper examples, clearer failure states, and simpler packaging help everyone.
A lot of roadmap debates get more useful once this frame is on the table. Some features are about parity. Some are about expansion. And some are about making the platform feel like a place you can actually land.
Those last ones are usually more leveraged than they first appear.