Thursday, November 5, 2009

Does continuous deployment help your product development strategy?

Can you deploy your software 50 times as day ? (yeah FIFTY) !! The folks at IMVU are doing it already..! But the more important question is if you can ripple this deployment model achievement into your overall product development strategy for achieving product differentiation in the marketplace?

The naysayers will resist and say that the product strategy is long term buddy and who cares about these minor deployment details...

But for emerging industries, where we have major technological and strategic uncertainties, and everyone is struggling to get the right business model or there is no product standardization, this deployment model also becomes one of the key links in the path to glory and market share.

To illustrate, let us imagine the IDEAL world of delivering a 'differentiated' product:
a) Product owners get 'new' requests from the customers FIFTY times a day
b) Product owners receive competitors/external environment reports FIFTY times a day
c) Project engineers can develop these 'prioritized' requests FIFTY times a day
d) Underlying platforms are available with 'features' for deployment FIFTY times a day
e) Project testers can test and deploy at customer sites the integrated product with 'new' requests FIFTY times a day
f) Of course if all the above happens then surely your 'threat from substitutes' is reduced by a factor of FIFTY if not more..

Imagine the customer *delight* when they receive their 'new' requests implemented in a single day !! WOW !!

Is this realistically possible / a necessity or just a dream? What do you think?

The folks at IMVU have certainly demonstrated the Deployment part of this linkage !!

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