Product Management and Continuous Delivery
In the digital era, Technological invention’s success is measured by level of its users. The pace of disruption is increasing exponentially. Telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million userbase, Facebook needed 2 years to reach 50 Million User Mark, whereas twitter took just 9 months to reach that mark. Interestingly Angry birds could reach that just in 35 days and Poke man achieved it just in 19 days. The period for disruption has decreased enormously. One key factor for today’s product success is speed at which it is delivered. There are many companies out there trying to solve same problem, but what matters is first to be in market. There are many great products still sitting in the minds of thought leaders instead in the hands of users, nevertheless they missed the bus already. Simple reason — Only Speed Surpasses, which can only be achieved by Practicing Continuous Delivery and right product management.
Product Management is an important organizational role especially in technology companies who is responsible for guiding the success of the product from defining the business context, setting product vision, formulate the strategy, define the roadmap, lead the execution, Analyze the competitive landscape, organize the feedback, ship the product . It is an interdisciplinary role (Works with Marketing, User Research, Business, Data Analysis, Engineering, Design, PR, legal, QA Teams) that plan, design and continuously bring better products to market.
Continuous Delivery has revolutionized the way of product management. Initially agile was much needed catalyst to change from Waterfall, Now Continuous Delivery is next phase in Product Management.
What ‘Continuous Delivery’ means to product management?
Continuous Delivery is product team’s capability to quickly push product updates such as new features, bug fixes to customers with well-defined processes and tools for shipping code in matter of seconds in continuous and sustainable manner. Continuous Delivery in Product Development is successful execution of continuous Deployment — which is reducing the time between writing code and pushing it live. Continuous Delivery is the process of making these efforts reach the end user successfully and sustainably which in turn increases opportunity for customer feedback.
The longer we go without experiencing the ‘Live Product’ and learning from it, the bigger the risk we fall into.
For instance, while building a new product — product management will have long term vision and short-term vision for the product in terms of problems to solve, areas to focus and customers to cater which ideally turns out to be product roadmap. Continuous Delivery from a New Product Standpoint is its ability for stakeholders to see the vision to reality at faster paces (Progress made end of each day / specific timeline), giving more chance to iterate through the roadmap. Technology companies choose several ways to test the waters before they make the short terms vision a reality, which is generally called MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to get the user feedback before actually develop the final product. Product managers use team’s continuous delivery capability to quickly assess the user feedback, analyze the feedback, draw decisions and ship the newer version in short span of time mostly in few hours to days and the whole cycle repeats. This way continuous delivery plays vital role in building right MVP in turn the right product. This is not just about deployment velocity, but phased and accurate way of maximizing customer value and business value. Product management live through this feedback loop.
For instance, in a Sustaining Product scenario — which made a recent major release, and trying to innovate more, Continuous delivery helps to run a piece of upgrade for a focus group, analyze feedback, make changes and ship again at the quicker possible. There are several technology companies who does 10–20 releases to same / different set of focus groups of a same piece of feature , and having such continuous delivery helps the product managers to evaluate , analyze market impact and helps the product management to take several decisions, evaluate alternatives, prioritize potential features/elements , do reprioritization where ever required .
Continuous Delivery gives chance to product management to increase the cadence of feedback loops which means each time updates are delivered; it gives chance to see user insights and feedback which further gives chance to product management to improvise. Shorter the feedback loops, less uncertainty hence more chances of building right product.
