Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Ready to Ship?
Are you losing your mind every time a project nears completion? Are you fed up with your developers telling you they're "done" only to discover two weeks before the ship date that some features are so buggy it's going to take months to fix them? Here's a good principle that will give you peace of mind: Always have a product you can theoretically ship.
There are two ways you can develop software. You can spend months cramming new functionality into a release and wait until the very end to debug the new features, or alternatively, you can break a larger release into smaller chunks and stabilize each one, herein referred to as a "milestone release," before moving on to the next development phase.
I've worked with both processes over the last 10 years. I'm not absolutely convinced (and I haven't seen any hard evidence) that one strategy is more rapid than the other. However, I can emphatically state that managing multiple milestone releases is much simpler than managing a single large one.
The trick behind milestone releases is to make sure that you stabilize each chunk before moving on to the next. In other words, your developers should not jump from release A to release B until all of the features from the first release have been thoroughly tested and all of the defects that would prevent you from shipping the product have been fixed. Again, the idea is to always …
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"Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children." - Mark Twain |