Transformed

CHAPTER 18Product Delivery

Most companies moving to the product model not only have to introduce the tech lead competency we discussed earlier, but they also have to upgrade their skills and infrastructure when it comes to building, testing, and deploying the products that their customers depend on.

In strong product companies, you'll often hear the phrase “Reliability is our most important feature.”

In modern technology-powered products and services, breaking the product can have immediate and damaging consequences to your users and customers, your revenue, your brand's reputation, and your colleagues (especially sales and customer success staff).

If you cause a serious issue, it can create an outage for all the customers and users who use and depend on that service. This is part of the price we pay for the many benefits of cloud computing.

With every product, there will be times where your customers encounter some serious problem requiring immediate action.

In these cases, you need the ability to immediately roll back the last change to stabilize the system, quickly diagnose the issue, create a solution, test that solution to ensure it solves the problem and doesn't inadvertently cause other issues (regressions), and then safely deploy that solution.

Customers generally understand that occasionally problems will occur, but they judge you more by your ability to respond quickly and competently when those issues do arise.

Waiting weeks or months is simply no longer acceptable ...