Refactoring an entire product from scratch: Stories from the product and design side

Most people would recommend refactoring a product gradually, piece by piece. At Supernova.io, we rewrote everything at once. It was risky, messy, and yes: we’d do it again. Two years later, here’s what we’ve learned.

This is not an engineering war story. This talk covers the rewrite from the product and design side: migrating our entire application from Flutter to React while serving large enterprise customers used to a biweekly cadence of new features. And operating on a limited runway of a seed-stage startup.

Whether you’re facing a rewrite of your own or just want to understand what it takes, here’s what I’ll cover:

• The feature-by-feature migration audit where we decided what to keep, rethink, or cut
• How we kept the old product alive while building the new one, and the tradeoffs that came with it
• The “no new features” rule we set and then broke anyway
• Choosing a third-party component library for our design system — what it gave us, what it cost us, and would we do it again?
• What to do when you have almost no product analytics available, and what our customers thought about us removing features
• How we failed at early access

I’ll close with a candid two-year retrospective on what held up, what we’re still paying for, and the decision frameworks that kept us moving.