Product Management
Letting Go of “Release”
In the modern world of continuous delivery, "releases" are no longer the important mega-event they once were. So why are we still planning everything around them?
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Letting Go of “Release”
When I began my career in the early 2000s, I worked on software that was sold in a box on a shelf at Best Buy. Shipping was an extraordinary event, so release plans and release candidates and gold CD-ROMs were extremely important and necessary. NOTHING mattered more than the release. (I still have and cherish celebratory first-run presses of WS_FTP CD-ROMs from releases I worked on.)
Today, the concept of a “release” as a planning unit is a problematic anachronism. It is misaligned with how high-performing teams actually deliver value.
A release is not a goal. It’s a logistical event. Planning around it encourages teams to focus on what can be shipped, not what should be solved. It turns roadmaps into delivery schedules instead of strategic tools. Teams ask, “What can we fit into the next release?” when the better question is, “What’s the next most valuable thing we can deliver?”
With continuous integration and continuous delivery, the infrastructure exists to ship value as soon as it will help your customers. You don’t have to wait for the release (and doing so is the definition of waste). In the modern world, releasing is a non-event.
Yet many teams (and work management tools) still plan like they’re pressing a once-a-year gold copy CD-ROM. This encourages feature-stuffing, scope creep, and last-minute heroics—all in service of an arbitrary deadline that ultimately serves only to delay the delivery of value to customers.
Worse, it distorts incentives. Teams start optimizing for the release itself—what fits, what’s ready, what looks good in a demo—rather than for learning, iteration, and user impact. It’s a mindset that prioritizes ceremony over agility.
For the love of all that’s holy, please stop planning around releases. Plan around the outcomes you want to deliver. Define success by the problems you solve, not the features you ship.
Let releases be a side effect of delivering value, not the organizing principle of your work.
If you’re stuck in an environment where breaking out of output-focus seems impossible, Melissa Perri has your back with her excellent book Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value (Bookshop.org link).
