a·gen·tic a·gil·i·ty

Legacy Systems Aren’t the Enemy—Friction Is: How to Unblock Innovation and Accelerate Agile Delivery

Is legacy tech slowing your team? Discover how removing friction unlocks agility, innovation, and faster delivery in your organisation.

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If there’s one thing I see time and again in organisations striving for agility, it’s the silent anchor of legacy systems. These are the old, creaking platforms and applications that, while once the backbone of the business, now act as a brake on innovation. I’ve worked with countless teams who are desperate to move forward, to deliver new features, to delight their customers—only to find themselves tripping over the same old obstacles, time and again.

Let’s be clear: legacy systems aren’t inherently bad. In fact, the very word “legacy” is a bit of a misnomer. A system that’s been around for decades isn’t a problem in itself—look at Windows, for example. It’s been with us since 1985, and yet nobody in their right mind would call it a “legacy system” in the pejorative sense. Why? Because it’s continually updated, maintained, and improved. The friction is managed, the rough edges are sanded down, and the system evolves.

But most organisations aren’t Microsoft. Most organisations have systems that have been left to gather dust, patched and propped up, but rarely given the attention they need to remain fit for purpose. And that’s where the trouble starts.

Friction: The Silent Killer of Innovation

Every time you put something in the way of your engineers—an outdated API, a brittle deployment process, a database that nobody dares to touch—you add friction. And friction, in the world of software engineering, is the enemy of progress.

  • Friction slows down delivery. Lead times stretch from days to weeks, or even months.
  • Friction breeds fragility. Deployments become nerve-wracking events, with everyone crossing their fingers and hoping nothing breaks.
  • Friction stifles scalability. The effort required to change or scale the system becomes so great that it’s simply not worth it.

I often compare this to the locks on your house or the alarm on your car. These measures don’t stop a determined thief, but they do dissuade the vast majority of opportunists. In engineering, though, friction doesn’t protect you—it just stops your own people from doing the right thing. Most engineers aren’t going to spend hours wrestling with a broken build pipeline or deciphering a spaghetti codebase. They’ll do what they can, but eventually, they’ll give up or work around the problem. And that’s when quality suffers, innovation stalls, and your competitors start to pull ahead.

The Real Cost of Legacy

It’s not just the engineers who feel the pain. Management feels it too, often in the form of endless approval cycles and business cases for “big investments” that don’t seem to deliver direct value to customers. I’ve sat in those meetings, trying to explain why we need to spend months refactoring a system that, on the surface, seems to be working just fine. The value isn’t always obvious—until, six months down the line, you realise you can’t onboard new users, or you can’t deliver that killer feature your customers are clamouring for.

The problem is rarely a lack of willingness. It’s a lack of understanding. If you don’t see the friction, you don’t see the need to remove it. And if you don’t remove it, you’re stuck.

What Makes a System “Legacy”?

Let’s return to that Windows example. The reason Windows isn’t a “legacy system” in the negative sense is because it’s actively maintained. People collaborate to remove friction, to keep the system moving forward. It’s not the age of the system that matters—it’s the attention you give it.

  • A legacy system is one that’s no longer evolving.
  • A legacy system is one where friction accumulates, unaddressed, until it becomes insurmountable.
  • A legacy system is one that holds you back, rather than propelling you forward.

What Can You Do?

If you recognise your own organisation in this description, you’re not alone. But you do need to act. Here’s my advice, based on years of helping teams break free from the shackles of legacy:

  1. Identify the friction points. Where are your engineers struggling? What’s slowing down delivery? Be honest and specific.
  2. Prioritise continuous improvement. Don’t let systems stagnate. Make maintenance and refactoring a first-class citizen in your backlog.
  3. Communicate the value. Help management understand that reducing friction isn’t just “technical debt”—it’s the foundation for future innovation.
  4. Invest in your architecture. Modernise where it matters, but don’t chase shiny objects for the sake of it. Focus on what will actually remove friction and enable progress.
  5. Celebrate progress. Every time you remove a boulder from the path, acknowledge it. Build a culture where continuous improvement is valued.

The Bottom Line

Your legacy systems are holding back your ability to innovate, to shorten lead times, to improve quality, and to scale. You need to fix them—not because they’re old, but because they’re in the way. Remove the friction, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your teams can move.

If you want to build a truly agile organisation, start by looking at the sand in your gears. It’s time to get out the sandpaper—and, if necessary, the sledgehammer.

For most organizations, they have a ton of legacy systems. And legacy systems are holding back their ability to innovate. They’re holding back their ability to move towards the new features and capabilities that they’re looking for.

Mostly because it gets in the way. It adds friction. Anytime you’ve got a bunch of engineers working on something and you put something in their way, it creates a little bit of friction, right? And if you have enough friction, then most people give up. Most people are not, you know, the sort of person that’s going to try and fiddle with it until they get it working. They just want it to work.

And if you put enough things in the way, it’s the same reason that you put a lock on your house or an alarm on your car. It’s not going to stop a professional thief, somebody who’s really trying to get around those things, but it dissuades the vast majority of people. And that’s about friction. You’re adding friction in that case for a positive outcome, not having your car stolen.

But in engineering work, in organizational systems, every piece of friction you add in the way makes it less likely that people will bother doing the thing that you want them to do. So part of working towards these ideas around engineering excellence is that we want to remove the friction, right? We want to remove that friction because what that friction leads to—and legacy systems are a huge part of that friction—is long lead times, fragile deployments, and your architectures just don’t scale because the effort to change the system to get it to the point where it can scale is just insurmountable.

And that friction can be seen at the engineering level with the engineering teams having difficulty. It can be seen at management level with approvals, right? Why is this going to take so long? What is this big investment in this thing that’s not going to provide any value to our direct value to our customers? Well, it’s going to provide long-term value to our customers. In six months, we’ll be able to increase the number of users that we have. And it just often doesn’t fly because there’s not a clear understanding of what it is. There’s not a clear understanding of what the problem is and there’s not a clear understanding of how do we reduce the friction in order to make things successful.

And once you have that friction in these legacy systems—and there’s nothing wrong with systems that have been around for a long time, that’s not a legacy system. I mean, it is, right? It’s a system that’s been around for a long time. But for example, Windows has been around for a really long time. 1985, something like that. That’s a really long time, right? That’s nearly 40 years. Forty or fifty years of Microsoft. They just celebrated their 50th anniversary and 40 years of Windows at least.

So why don’t we think of Windows as a legacy system? Because it’s continually updated and maintained and people collaborate on how do we get rid of these little frictions that come along. It starts with a bit of sandpaper, right, getting in our way, but it turns into a bunch of boulders and the engine seizes up and we can’t move forward.

So, your legacy systems are what’s holding back your ability to innovate, to shorten your lead times, to improve quality in your products, and to scale your architectures. You need to fix them.

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