An excellent piece. I’m especially interested to hear stories from the fellow HNers about the last point Jocelyn mentions: how to build 2 shipping cultures inside one company, when your business requires it (for example: two-sided marketplaces with different apps for consumer and businesses).
In our case, we have this situation with SW vs HW shipping culture. On the SW side, we focus on continuously developing features and have deliberately emphasized productivity over schedule-predictability, while on the HW side they naturally are focused more on schedule-predictability due to complex dependencies.
Now, this dichotomy has created an interesting discussions inside the company on the right way to ship products and projects, and to me, arguments mainly come from the fact that people come from the different shipping culture and have hard time to see the benefits and requirements of the other culture.
I really like how she connects the necessity of the software for customers to release risk management. It's a very user-centric view which I like. Helps me understand release processes I've experienced much better from a business angle too. It makes sense that with few vendors who will experience high degrees of pain from bad releases that it tends to encourage more conservative, move-slow-and-don't-break-shit mentality.
I'm constantly searching on the internet for posts that will help me.
After a few years in startups, I’ve found the only death knell to shipping software – when product runs out of ideas.
You can work around everything else. Prioritize speed or stability, use different standards for different areas, even any number of project management methodologies. A group of talented folks with a goal can make anything work.
But when you’re out of ideas, that’s when shipping dies. Your engineering department devolves into a pile of factorings and refactorings and turd polishing projects and academic exercises and none of it drives the business forward. It’s just busywork because engineers are expensive.
And trust me, they’re gonna get tired of the busywork and they will leave. You’ll get tired of paying them for busywork too.