🎉 The BIG 1.0 Release

BIG releases are appealing — the magical moment when everything comes together. The months or years of hard work that finally come to fruition. The excitement and fanfare of the BIG announcement. The accolades and admiration of customers and the press.

... except, it rarely works this way unless you are Apple or Tesla. And what we don't see with high-end consumer products is the rigorous internal release and testing programs ... something lower-volume industrial products don't have the luxury and resources to do.

The BIG Release mindset assumes all the code and designs will magically ship when the BIG day comes. It never goes this smoothly. Sure, we may build prototypes and do testing, but unless we do these with release processes we can reuse, it is hard to be confident we can do it again quickly, easily, and accurately. One-off prototype processes don't scale. Only release processes scale. And the reality is that the rigor of releases in the prototype phase works better anyway.

The solution is of course ... Release First. The problem is that The BIG 1.0 Release fits human nature better (procrastination, excitement, and glory). Release First is boring, tedious at first, and no one cares. The effort is invisible and rarely gets rewarded. Very few developers are wired for Release First. Thus, Release First is not a technical problem, but rather a cultural one.