(2022-09-16) Cagan Moore Changing How You Build

Martin Cagan/Jon Moore: Changing How You Build: much more important than the particular tools, methods or processes, are three core principles that lay at the foundation of how strong product companies build products:

1. PROTECTING CUSTOMERS, REVENUE, BRAND, COLLEAGUES

breaking the product can have immediate and damaging consequences (incident analysis)

2. RESPONDING TO MARKET NEEDS

not just used for getting new capabilities... when something changes in the market, the competitive landscape, or the environment

When there are serious issues that are impacting our customers, we need the ability to quickly diagnose... Waiting weeks or months is no longer acceptable

3. EARNING THE TRUST OF OUR CUSTOMERS

SMALL, FREQUENT, RELIABLE RELEASES

The core technique that is used to address each of these principles is the notion of small, frequent, reliable releases.

in order to consistently deliver small, frequent, reliable releases, we need to take very seriously our obligation to test, known more formally as quality assurance.

when we build a new capability, we need to test that the new capability will work as expected

The second is to ensure that the changes made to enable the new capability do not unintentionally or inadvertently break anything else. This is referred to as regression testing

We recommend the excellent book Accelerate.

A NOTE ABOUT AGILE METHODS

you don’t need Agile methods in order to have consistent, small, frequent releases.

many of the best product teams in the world have mastered the ability to consistently deploy these small releases (referred to as continuous integration and continuous deployment or “CICD”), yet they don’t follow any formal Agile process or methods. (continuous delivery)

there is a spreading disease in the technology world where heavyweight processes masquerade as Agile, yet literally release only once a quarter.