Technology
Modernizing a High-Risk Customer Platform to Reduce Retention Risk
De-risking core Rails workflows where failures would impact customer trust, renewals, and long-term revenue.
Services Provided
High-Risk System Modernization, Assessment-first De-risking, Safe Evolution of Revenue-impacting Workflows
Product Type
Technologies Used
Customer Platform
Ruby on Rails
Product Type
Customer Platform
Technologies Used
Ruby on Rails
Project Highlights
Changes can be introduced without destabilizing customer workflows
System remained stable as gaps were addressed and behavior evolved
Platform can continue improving without repeated fear of regressions or customer fallout
About
For subscription and usage-based platforms, retention is tightly coupled to system behavior. When customer-facing workflows are fragile, inconsistent, or difficult to change safely, even small regressions can erode trust and accelerate churn.
In this engagement, the client's Rails system sat directly on the retention path. Customers depended on the platform's behavior remaining stable while the business needed to evolve it to address emerging gaps.
Def Method was engaged to modernize this system in a way that made change safe, allowing the organization to address retention risk without destabilizing live customer workflows.
Challenge
The platform was difficult to evolve safely. While the system was in active use by customers, several high-risk conditions had emerged:
Revenue risk — Customer churn was tied to system behavior and gaps in core workflows. Any regression introduced while addressing those gaps would compound retention problems rather than solve them.
Reliability risk — Changes to customer-critical paths risked breaking existing usage patterns, leading to confusion, support burden, or loss of trust.
Irreversibility risk — Once customers encountered a degraded experience, the damage was difficult to undo. Rolling back changes would not immediately restore confidence.
The organization knew change was required, but moving quickly or 'experimenting' in production would have been reckless. This was a classic modernization problem: necessary change in a system where the downside of getting it wrong was high.
Solution
We treated this engagement as high-risk modernization, not product iteration. Before addressing gaps or expanding functionality, we focused on de-risking change:
Stabilize customer-critical workflows — We identified the parts of the Rails system most closely tied to retention and ensured those paths were protected before any changes were introduced.
Clarify where change was safe — By examining system behavior and dependencies, we established boundaries for safe change versus areas that required additional protection.
Enable intentional evolution — Rather than layering changes onto fragile foundations, we focused on making the system safer to evolve over time.
The modernization effort focused on making the platform safer to change while preserving existing customer behavior. Core workflows were clarified and stabilized. Risky dependencies were reduced or isolated. The Rails system became more predictable under change. Teams could address customer-visible gaps without fear of widespread regression. Modernization here did not mean rewriting the platform. It meant making necessary change possible again in a system where customer trust and revenue were on the line.
Results
The modernization delivered outcomes aligned with the system's risk profile. Changes could be introduced without destabilizing customer workflows. The system remained stable as gaps were addressed and behavior evolved. The platform can now continue improving without repeated fear of regressions or customer fallout. Customers experienced continuity and confidence, not disruption.
By addressing risk first, the organization gained a foundation that supports retention-focused change without compounding the very problems it was trying to solve.
Retention problems are often treated as product or UX issues. In reality, they are frequently rooted in systems that have become too risky to change. This engagement succeeded because modernization was approached as a risk management problem before a delivery problem — identifying where change was dangerous, de-risking those areas, and only then enabling improvement. That is the core of Def Method's work: modernizing Rails systems when breaking things is expensive.