BEC Systems

Someone asked: “What is the difference between releasing and shipping?”

What is the downside of not Releasing First?

With Release First, the goal is to optimize the Big Blue Button (make it easy for users to use a release) early.

In the past days, we’ve been focusing on the Big Green Button, but there is another side of this - what happens after the release?

Gerald M.

What do we mean by Release “First”?

As previously stated, the Big Green Button enables teams to quickly and confidently release.

The word “release” can be a noun (what gets released) or a verb (the process of producing a release).

As previously discussed, a release is useful and quality.

As discussed in the previous two posts, things often go haywire near the end of a project cycle, right before the BIG Release.

Many tools exist for managing and tracking projects: Jira, Trello, GitHub projects/issues, Notion, Airtable, Asana, MS Project, etc.

I’ll go first … a very common challenge is shipping on time and the resulting uncertainty to the business.

A release must be: reliable, useful, repeatable, and predictable.

From Paul Graham’s popular essay Do Things That Don’t Scale: Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling.

Estimating or predicting product development is difficult.

In the olden days, releases were a lot of work.

Most of the time, teams write the user manual at the end of a product development cycle right before the Big 1.0 Release.

Some development teams have a weekly demo where they might show what they are working on to others in the company or the customer, which is a great idea as it encourages hitting milestones and early feedback.

Do you (and by extension your organization) find yourself mired in minutia and struggling to find time for higher value tasks?

Recently, one of our servers running Arch Linux refused to boot after updates.

Everything has a cost and value to the customer.

Reliability is a common concern - this thing is critical - it needs to work!

What do project delays cost?

As an experienced person, I am sometimes called on to review something.

Thus far, we have defined a release as something that is useful and high-quality.

It is natural to think of internal releases as “low stakes” - if it crashes and burns, no big deal.

Everything!

Some feedback on yesterday’s post (What is a release): What specifically flows into the two points?

There are two aspects of a product release: Something useful that others can experience.

Shipping faster does not only mean getting to v1.0 faster (or even on time), but also many internal releases at a good rate.

On the contrary, platform thinking readily embraces other tools and platforms.

Some great feedback on the previous post (Impressive is not always effective): “I agree.

When AI generates something, the result is often “impressive.”

In this age of machine-generated perfection, something is still deeply rewarding about grabbing a stick of wood and making something by hand.

The definition of the word “platform” includes things like the following: Acts as foundational for other products or services, not the final end product itself.

Platform Thinking in the context of product development has many parallels to effective habits in personal life.

Platform Thinking is for anyone who wants to take the friction out of creating, publishing, testing, integrating, and deploying products.

Below are several timelines illustrating long-term compression comparing a product development timeline: 20 years ago Today Today with Platform Thinking The big effect of long-term compression is that negative consequences can hit much earlier, delaying i…

One reality of developing products with modern technology is the compression of the short and long-term.

This is an interesting post from a Marketing person creating website pages: I built 19 website pages in a single day while my team was out for US thanksgiving.

“AI Slop” is a common expression describing a familiar phenomenon.

A reader responded to the last post with a comment: Isn’t “agile” a part of product thinking too?

Platform vs. product thinking is a difference in perspective.

The ultimate platform success is when an internal platform turns into a sellable product/service, or an open source project.

When thinking about developer workflows, tools, and resources, dividing them into two categories proves useful: personal and group.

When updating the Simple IoT documentation, the question arose - how to install mdbook and a few plugins?

Markdown is now a nearly universal format for documentation in many workflows.

Why?

A familiar phrase states: “Good, fast, cheap.

A common objection to “Platform Thinking” (proactively build your platform from the start) is: there isn’t time right now; this can be done after the 1.0 release when there is ample time and resources.