The other day we passed product release number 25,000 for WordPress.com. That means we’ve averaged about 16 product releases a day, every day for the last four and a half years! How is this possible and why do we release software in this way?
Launching products is one of the hardest things companies do. Most companies pour months of work into making sure everything goes right at a launch – the features are right, the marketing is ready, the press is primed, the product is solid, etc. But a new breed of companies are doing things very differently. Instead of optimizing product launches to go as perfectly as possible, they optimize to have them go as quickly as possible.
Let’s compare and contrast:
#1 Optimize for perfection: Features are carefully analyzed and planned, progress is reviewed at multiple stages with various stakeholders, multiple development and testing cycles, launch dates are carefully planned out and coördinated. Result: Product is released every few months.
#2 Optimize for speed: Features are broken into smallest possible pieces, code is incrementally developed, tested and launched, launch dates are fluid, products can be updated in seconds. Result: Product is released continuously. The emerging term for this is continuous deployment.
People will tell you that it’s easy to be fast when your product team is tiny and you have just a few customers, but when you grow you will need to put product development processes in place that will slow things down but help you prevent chaos. One of our goals at Automattic is to prove that particular piece of conventional wisdom wrong. To do so, we have continued to invest in high-speed product releases as our team and customer base have grown. Here is how we do it:
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