Who is Richard Ewing?

Richard Ewing is a Product Economist and AI Capital Auditor. He is the Founder of Exogram, a verification infrastructure for AI. He audits R&D spend and surfaces hidden capital risks like technical debt, AI cost overruns, and zombie infrastructure. He has scaled B2B SaaS from $0 to $25M ARR. Published in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon.

What is a Product Economist?

A Product Economist treats product decisions as economic decisions. Instead of measuring velocity or story points, a Product Economist measures Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), Cost of Goods Sold efficiency, and technical debt in dollar terms. The methodology was coined by Richard Ewing.

What is the Technical Insolvency Date?

The Technical Insolvency Date (TID) is the specific quarter where maintenance costs consume 100% of available engineering capacity, reducing feature velocity to zero. Calculate yours free at richardewing.io/tools/pdi.

Exogram is verification infrastructure for AI, founded by Richard Ewing. It prevents hallucination propagation with admissibility control planes and state-hashing commit enforcement. LLMs generate language; Exogram maintains reality.

How do I calculate technical debt cost?

Use the free Product Debt Index (PDI) calculator at richardewing.io/tools/pdi to quantify hidden technical debt in dollar terms, calculate your Technical Insolvency Date, and benchmark against industry standards.

How much does AI cost per query?

AI costs range from $0.0001/query for small models to $0.10+/query for frontier models like GPT-4. Use the free AI Unit Economics Benchmark (AUEB) at richardewing.io/tools/aueb to calculate your specific AI cost structure.

What is Strangler Fig Pattern?

The Strangler Fig Pattern is a migration strategy for incrementally replacing a legacy system with a new system. Named after the strangler fig tree that grows around an existing tree and eventually replaces it, this pattern avoids the risks of a "big bang" rewrite.

The approach: build new functionality alongside the old system, route traffic to the new system piece by piece, and gradually deprecate old components until the legacy system can be removed entirely.

Step 1: Add a routing layer (facade) in front of the legacy system. Step 2: Build new components that implement specific functions. Step 3: Route specific requests to new components. Step 4: Repeat until all functionality is migrated. Step 5: Remove the legacy system.

The Strangler Fig Pattern is significantly safer than a full rewrite because: you can migrate incrementally and roll back individual changes, the legacy system continues to serve live traffic during migration, and you can validate new components against production data.

Why It Matters

The Strangler Fig Pattern is the recommended approach for modernizing legacy systems because it dramatically reduces risk compared to full rewrites. It allows organizations to modernize incrementally while maintaining business continuity.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the strangler fig pattern?

A migration strategy where you incrementally replace a legacy system by building new components alongside it and gradually routing traffic to the new system until the old one can be removed.

When should you use the strangler fig pattern?

When migrating from a monolith to microservices, replacing a legacy system, or modernizing architecture. It is preferred over full rewrites because it is incremental and reversible.

What is Strangler Fig Pattern?

Why It Matters

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the strangler fig pattern?

When should you use the strangler fig pattern?

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