Release It!

Releases Shouldn’t Hurt

One of my favorite retailers has a release process that rivals a NASA launch sequence. It starts in the afternoon and runs until the wee hours of the morning. In the early days, more than twenty people had active roles to play during the release. These days, that is down to less than a dozen. As you might imagine, any process involving that many people requires detailed planning and coordination. Because each release is arduous, they don’t do many a year. Because there are so few releases, each one tends to be unique. That uniqueness requires additional planning with each release, making the release a bit more painful—further discouraging more frequent releases.

Releases should about as big an event as getting ...