I’ve been thinking about product development and delivery cycles we’ve witnessed across hundreds of companies, whether they are vendors in the business of making software products, or businesses delivering their own software with the help of product vendors.
Everyone’s in the software business to some extent. It’s not just for category leaders with huge technical bench depth. Almost any decent-sized company is delivering a software product alongside their analog business.
It seems the companies who achieve sustained growth through digital transformation don’t manage software by the high-pressure release or the version number, as a big-bang product of old.
They manage software as a continuously evolving feature of the customer experience, as delivered by the business.
As tired as I get of sports analogies, in professional golf, they have a saying “Drive for show, and putt for dough.”
It highlights how a long shot off the tees may be impressive, but the purse winners know how to consistently execute better at short distances, on the greens.However, I prefer comparing managing your company’s software estate to bowling. Bowling is more of a proletariat sport compared to golf, which has a bit of an elitist flair. It’s an individual sport, but with team camaraderie.
Plus, I’m a much better bowler than golfer (though I’ll duff around on a cheap municipal course any day).
Reframing the Game
A few years ago, I was a pretty good weekly bowler with a powerful strike throw, but an inconsistent ability to finish my spares. Then I had to get a hip replacement surgery, and I assumed that I’d probably never bowl again.
But instead, when presented with a tournament opportunity by my new employer CA a year later, I decided I’d continue revisiting every aspect of my game around delivering the ball with the least amount of effort and impact on my body as possible.
The thing I like about bowling is, like software, it offers three dimensions for improvement:
- Incremental: Each of the 10 frames, you have an opportunity to build upon your score by aiming for a strike, but adjusting for a spare if you miss all the pins.
- Iterative: Each of the 10 frames also is a reset, a chance to start anew in perfecting your throw or testing out a different approach.
- Consistency: It’s the only game that specifically awards consistency over time, so if you can keep picking up spares and closing frames, it adds bonus points in successive frames.
It seems like the companies that consistently succeed at delivering software are the ones that produce the least impressively sized individual units of functionality. Like a pro bowler who always picks up spare pins, they are building upon past achievements both incrementally and iteratively.
When you visit a high-performing product development team, you seldom perceive the incredible rate of achievement they are generating. People generally go home on time. There’s seldom a reason for panic mode, nor compressing testing to allow more last-minute development.
You might attribute all of the above results to Agile Development methodologies, which are a critical part of any such development productivity improvement. But having an Agile team alone won’t solve the release pressure if the business isn’t aligned.
Marketecture at Play
Why do companies feel the urge to pitch and produce an impressively sized release?
While sales growth and financial results speak for themselves, there’s the belief that a major milestone release or a bigger, better product may give investors a reason to expect a more significant growth rate or change in market position.
The allure of a sea-change iconic launch event, like Gates and Ballmer awkwardly dancing Windows 95 into existence, or Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone, can prove hard to resist for executives and development teams bent on heroic glory.
Even Agile teams can fall prey to big-bang release madness. When stories start getting prioritized and packed into the next major version without customer iterations, and development starts holding off on consistent incremental releases because there are just too many moving parts that must be integrated simultaneously before a real test can be run, someone’s headed for a waterfall.
One company that impressed me in this arena was ServiceNow, a company that is doing very well by any measure.
At their Knowledge 2019 event in May, in front of an audience of around 20,000 rabid fans (their customers really are fans), product leadership was amazingly restrained in setting new product expectations.
“We’re going to deliver IT and managed security playbooks THIS YEAR,” said Pablo Stern, the GM of IT service products. While that’s just one of many updates execs mentioned at the show, and the updates were loosely tied to major versions, other release expectations were similarly conservative.
When customers talk about product innovation and features more than the company itself, that’s always a good sign.
Picking up spares every time
In the end, I did pretty well after experimenting with my minimum possible effort bowling release for 3 months. I got my average score over 160, thanks to consistently testing lane conditions, and picking up most of the easy spares. I even bowled an almost-perfect 286 one time. Sure, my release wasn’t pretty, nor as powerful as it used to be, but it worked.
More than half off all developers now work in some form of agile development shop, and as that majority grows, things start looking more hopeful for reliably delivering software products.
Still, agile doesn’t represent a company’s overall product delivery strategy, which needs to be aligned with customer needs first for incremental, iterative and consistent releases without the big-bang risk. Companies that sustain a market lead through innovation have a soft release, service management mindset.
The Intellyx Take
What if you still want that big-bang marketing release anyway? Well, step right up!
But first, engage customers in design, roll out pilot releases and turn on services gradually with blue-green deployments. Today we have ready architecture for very fast, repeatable software experimentation and release: readily available and well-developed dev/test/deploy automation, scalable cloud infrastructure, ephemeral container architectures, even the ability to have customers participate in product design itself.
When you do that big launch, wouldn’t it be even better to announce you have already proven customers like it, and it will work?
©2019, Intellyx, LLC. As of the time of writing, ServiceNow is an Intellyx customer. Microsoft is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other companies mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image source: Benjamin Réthoré, flickr.
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