shipping
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📦 What is a release used for?
A release needs to happen before a product is shipped to customers for sale. Across the spectrum of the product development lifecycle, releases are used for: Generate feedback (so we know where we stand) Provide something others can build …
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⚡ The essence of shipping faster
In recent conversations about why development schedules slip and what to do about it, several themes continue to come up: Openness - This is key to surfacing issues early. Safety - People must feel safe being transparent and speaking up. C…
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🔀 What is the difference between MVP and Release First?
MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a concept from Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology. The idea is to build the smallest possible version of a product that lets you test a hypothesis with real users. Instead of spending months building a full-…
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🎉 The BIG 1.0 Release
BIG releases are appealing — the magical moment when everything comes together. The months or years of hard work that finally come to fruition. The excitement and fanfare of the BIG announcement. The accolades and admiration of customers an…
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❓ What is the difference between "releasing" and "shipping"?
Someone asked: “What is the difference between releasing and shipping?” Are they the same thing? In one sense they are. However, drawing a distinction here—though somewhat arbitrary—is helpful in this context. Release: Make something availa…
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🚨 Problems with not Releasing First
What is the downside of not Releasing First? Integration problems Manufacturing issues Last minute bugs appearing Lack of product fit (does not solve customer’s problem) The common theme is unforeseen problems that typically surface late …
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🧠 The Human Factors
Gerald M. Weinberg once said: No matter what the problem is, it’s always a people problem. — Gerald M. Weinberg At its heart, release-first addresses the human element: Our propensity to procrastinate in getting releases out. Our fear th…
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☝️ What do we mean by "First"?
What do we mean by Release “First”? Several things: First in the timeline of development. First thing we focus on during implementation. First priority. Simply put, implement the Big Green Button before implementing the actual deliverable…
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🟢 The Big Green Button
The word “release” can be a noun (what gets released) or a verb (the process of producing a release). “What” and “How”. Many teams produce complete high-quality releases that allow them to produce or deploy something at some point in time. …
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🔄 The release circle
As previously discussed, a release is useful and quality. What counts as a release? One way to think about this is to view the release as a circle with two attributes: What (it contains) Who (it’s for) Initially, there is not much in the …
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🚢 What is the #1 problem in product development?
I’ll go first … a very common challenge is shipping on time and the resulting uncertainty to the business. We often add a 2-3x factor on any estimates, but sometimes even that is not enough. Shipping (delivering value) is the bottom line — …
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🔮 Can we predict product development schedules?
Estimating or predicting product development is difficult. Teams often end up adding a 2-3x padding to any estimate, because bitter experience has taught them not to depend on their own estimates. There will always be a high degree of varia…
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⏱️ How do you find time for higher value tasks?
Do you (and by extension your organization) find yourself mired in minutia and struggling to find time for higher value tasks? What is the solution? You can hire more people to do the lower-value stuff (a perfectly valid approach). You can …
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🚀 Shipping faster - what are the stakes?
What do project delays cost? The obvious thing is the loss of revenue. Time is money. However, there are other less tangible consequences: Customers lose interest. Team loses motivation. Supporting organizations (vendors/communities) may n…
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📦 What do we release?
Everything! Documentation Hardware Software Prototypes Products Lunch Engineering is fundamentally the act of creating something new. And that something new needs to be useful to someone or something. And the way we deliver “useful” is th…
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📦 What is a release?
There are two aspects of a product release: Something useful that others can experience. Produced with a high level of confidence. Everything flows into these two points.
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🚀 Shipping faster leads to predictability
Shipping faster does not only mean getting to v1.0 faster (or even on time), but also many internal releases at a good rate. This is the only way to bring predictability into the development process.
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🗜️ Long-term compression
One reality of developing products with modern technology is the compression of the short and long-term. Today, the consequences of actions come back on the timeframe of months instead of years, as it might have been ten or twenty years ago…
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💭 Thinking, Designing, Developing, Engineering ...
If we are thinking without writing, are we really thinking? If we are designing without sketching/drawing, are we really designing? If we are developing software without iterations/testing, are we really developing? If we are engineering wi…
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🏆 What is the #1 purpose of YOUR Platform?
The purpose of YOUR Platform is to reduce friction in delivering value to your customers. We are in business to deliver value to our customers. If we can do this better, we can deliver more value. There are lots of ways we can do this. Auto…