In the world of software, products and systems don’t just remain static, they evolve, accumulate technical debt, and sometimes become an unmanageable mess of outdated frameworks, workarounds, and fragile dependencies. When dealing with a 15-year-old platform, the question isn’t just how to modernize but what to modernize. Should you refactor piece by piece or completely rebuild? What about adding that new feature for the Product Owner. The answer isn’t always obvious. This session explores how blending product thinking with software modernization leads to better outcomes. We’ll examine the lens of long-term product strategy, user needs, and business value. Using real-world lessons from a long-running SaaS product, a case study in modernizing a complex legacy platform, we’ll highlight how to balance technical constraints with customer expectations. Whether you’re leading a legacy transformation or trying to avoid one in the future, this talk will showcase some smart modernization decisions that don’t make the business take a full stop.

Building apps for the cloud has always been hard. Developers are typically pulled away from writing their business logic and what matters most to deal with the complexity of the cloud. To help simplify cloud app complexity, Microsoft has introduced .NET Aspire. It includes a curated set of components that make sense to use in your C# projects. .NET Aspire makes it easy to discover, acquire, and configure essential dependencies for cloud-native apps from the very beginning of your project. Join me to walk through the set-up and usage of this new, powerful tool that can make any .NET developer more efficient in delivering cloud-native applications.