3 Tips for Keeping Your Brand’s Ecosystem in Bloom

Managing large digital evergreen platforms for brands isn’t an easy task.

Various needs and ideas come up over time and the platform must be nimble enough to respond to new insights and changes quickly. Furthermore, the trending concept of functional integration makes it necessary for the main project be supported by other campaigns with different life-cycles but with potentially overlapping areas of concern and dependencies.

Like a blooming garden, keeping your ecosystem healthy means requires both fertilizing and pruning.  These 3 Tips will help you harvest the fruits of your labor.

Seeding

Don’t think you will make a huge refactor all at once. The first advice here is to create a new branch and implement one of the small refactors above. If your refactor focuses on lot of stuff, you might give it up or take short cuts; and even if you succeed, the merge with the new features that keep being developed can be painful.

Fertilizing

You use a lot of libraries on your digital products. These libraries are constantly being developed and improved. Keep your libraries up-to-date and understand how they can help you work in a more efficient way. Of course, updating libraries is not easy in some cases, but you should consider the trade-off between the benefits of updating or not.

Pruning

The campaigns that run with the main project usually have a smaller lifetime. Don’t be afraid to find what is not used and delete it. It will be much simpler for new members to understand the whole project.

Lastly, even if some features are not new features (or even broken features), you should review and think about the benefits of changing it. In digital products you discover many right choices along the way. Taking a step back to re-implement the new behavior can be good for maintaining your code. Try to improve the existing code with SOLID principles and a good OO design.