⚡ The essence of shipping faster

In recent conversations about why development schedules slip and what to do about it, several themes continue to come up:

• Openness - This is key to surfacing issues early.
• Safety - People must feel safe being transparent and speaking up.
• Collaboration - People must be willing to share, help others, and receive help from others or use what others have built. Effective people don't work in silos.

These all come down to culture. As one person put it:

Process without culture doesn't work.

The human factors are the hard part, and the most difficult for technically oriented people to figure out. But, they are the key to high-performing teams.

Great leadership and how to affect culture is beyond the scope of this article, but Release First is a powerful tool for assisting leaders in developing a healthy culture. Why? Because releasing early and often is the ultimate act of transparency. It provides visibility into exactly what the team accomplishes and how well they accomplish it. Issues surface early. There are no proxies to hide behind.

Releasing also gives people confidence and satisfaction as they see things moving forward. The job of a leader is to encourage people to release their work, encourage others to use those releases, and foster a culture of speaking up. The focus must remain on the path forward to the next release, not on blaming people for what went wrong in the last release. Do this, and the rest will largely take care of itself.