Replacing legacy software without copying its flaws
Environmental nonprofit, UK, 2026
An environmental nonprofit that assesses hundreds of large companies and financial institutions each year was replacing the legacy software their assessment work runs on. They wanted a system that made the work simpler for everyone involved, from their own assessors to the companies being assessed, and their in-house developers were ready to build it. What they needed first was a clear definition of what the new system had to do. Over eight weeks I talked to the people who would use it and went through the existing software with them: which parts they relied on, which nobody used, and which didn’t fit how they actually work. From there we worked out how they wanted their day-to-day work supported, and I wrote the product requirements document: goals, users, and requirements grouped by area of work. Then I wrote out all 209 user stories in the team’s project tool, each with acceptance criteria and non-functional requirements such as data volumes and an audit trail of who changed what.
The requirements document was approved, and the in-house team took it from there to design and build the new system.