Stop Wasting Money and Deploy to Production NOW

If your team has built functionality that cannot be used by end customers, then, by definition, the return on investment for that work is negative. Each hour that goes by without delivering to Prod, your team is costing money instead of adding value.

But it’s not ready yet!

Fine. I will concede that it does take some amount of time to write code and make sure everything works. However, anything after that—any time between “this feature is done” and “my customer can use it”—is pure waste. If it’s done, ship it now.

But nobody wants just this feature by itself!

Why did you build it then?

Uhh…

It doesn’t matter. Ship it anyway. You’ll find out right away whether your customers actually care or not, then you can make decisions based on real usage of your software, not conjecture. If it doesn’t work out, you can immediately move on to something else. Much better than wasting even more time building follow-on functionality nobody wants.

But deploying our app is hard!

Make it easier, then. If it is painful to deploy functionality that’s already tested and ready to go, imagine how much it would suck to roll out an emergency hotfix? There are a ton of tools out there to help make deployments painless. Use them!

But that will waste even more time and money!

It won’t, and I can prove it. I’ll lay out the math in the next post of this series.