Continuous delivery in a startup product

Continuous delivery in product development for startup/early adopters: This article relates to the product development journey in an early stage startup. You can easily extend this to innovative developments in product where you’re focusing on agile developments with continuous feedback. However, make sure that you establish the ground rules between production code and experimental developments so that people know the value of a beta.

As a startup, sometimes both the production code and early stage experimental developments tend to be the same. Speed is one of the most important values to consider in agile developments. Most agile companies try to ship a development every 2 weeks to get feedback and use that for continuous development. Does that work for you? What are the advantages and disadvantages of continuous delivery?

Continuous delivery for Product Development

For the sake of this discussion, I want to treat continuous delivery as a development that’s released every 2 weeks for customer feedback. Your customers are either early adopters or beta customers depending on your customer engagement. They can even be your anchor customer who’s helping product development. This discussion also relates to MVP product development.

Advantages of continuous agile delivery:

1. The outcomes reach customer quick so that you get immediate feedback whether something is useful or not
2. Prevents wastage in developing features that aren’t required by customers
3. Customers’ expectations can be managed to seek real valuable feedback and create more finesse with time

It is brilliant to continuously get feedback so that you don’t waste effort in building useless features. The core tenet of agile processes is least waste while adding most value. However, make sure that you use it with caution. Not all releases have value. Communicate to customer and elicit feedback only when really needed. Or else you’ll run the risk of the customer losing interest. Related: Who is an early adopter?

Disadvantages of continuous or fast developments in a startup

1. Not all features are fully formed. Sometimes, this may cause the customer to lose interest in staying as your early adopter.
2. Sometimes, these small incremental improvements might not make any difference to a customer. This leads to them losing interest and hence hampering the quality of feedback
3. Loss of customer trust and goodwill if they aren’t able to connect with you.

The most important thing to remember in continuous delivery is to ensure that you’re constantly adding value. I’ve seen several feedback forms where customers are annoyed with the number of changes on a biweekly basis. Although quick releases work very well theoretically, the danger is that your customer can lose interest very easily and they’ll have to relearn how to do things all over again.

Things to remember in continuous delivery for customer

• Make sure that you add value
• Don’t disrupt a customer’s way of working without giving them advance notice
• Always provide an option to revert to old way of working so that you know whether something works
• Ask for feedback or make release only when you need to. Make sure that you’re strategic and identify what you need from the feedback before just releasing and asking for feedback.

Ultimately continuous and quick delivery for customer has to follow certain key principles. You can achieve the above results by the following methods in your product development process:

Acceptance Criteria

Make sure that you have solid acceptance criteria for each feature that you’re developing. The acceptance criteria clearly explain what a customer is expecting from this feature. Make sure that all requirements of this criteria are met before releasing. If it is not met, don’t release. Even if it is an MVP, it must still add value and meet the acceptance and quality criteria.

Bugs

Quick and continuous delivery doesn’t mean that your quality can reduce. You must provide a great quality of experience because it ties in closely with your brand perception. The moment you start producing poor quality code, customers will start losing interest and trust in your product. Quality cannot be compromised for speed.

Feedback in continuous delivery

Feedback is very previous as long is it is specific and structured. If you’re releasing a beta for a particular feedback – make sure that your customer knows about it. This cannot hide in a long release notes, the ask should be clear and specific. Your biggest threat in continuous release is in frustrating the customer with loads of information. Instead, keep it simple and crisp to get maximum value

“Don’t wait for perfection. Life isn’t perfect. Do the best you can and ship. Real people ship, and then they test and then they ship again. Then you wake up one day and you have something insanely great.”

-Guy Kawasaki, Entrepreneur