This past week we ended up making two releases: one on Monday and the other late Thursday night. The Monday release was a carryover from the previous week finalizing new functionality for a very important demo on Tuesday. The Thursday release contained features for a newly connected client that was shown to them on Friday. And I was on the critical path for both releases – not fun.

Fortunately, I’m on a team that is highly supportive and collaborative. My teammates were continuously looking for ways to support the releases and alleviate the burden on each others’ shoulders. The Thursday release happened a little after midnight and my teammates and our product manager/customer were there to regression test the build after it went into production.

In a previous life, when helping teams develop the capacity to compress their release cycles, I emphasized the importance of building truly cross-functional teams – teams containing all the roles necessary to carry a release from inception to deployment. At my current company this is easy: we just have developers and a customer. However, having a cross-functional team is not enough. You really need to have created a culture that is collaborative and supportive; a culture where there is no hand-offs and everyone takes responsibility for the success of the release. Without this kind of culture frequent releases are just not sustainable.

Both releases were well received and will contribute to significant new business for our company. However, biweekly feature releases will, I hope, be a rare occurrence. I find it contributes significantly to the stress and potential burnout of the team (at least it does for me anyway). In a rapidly growing company, sometimes a weekly cycle is not fast enough. That said, this could have been averted through better planning and coordination. The weekly release cycle is new to our sales staff, and having a better understanding of how it works will allow them to schedule accordingly in the future.