Our new development cycle is paying off 🙏
I started Hellonext.co back in 2018, which was an evolution of my previous product called (Evolvr.io #1 product of the day in 2015 on Product Hunt). Since then, we've been trying out different product release cycle.
Here are some of them:
Basecamp's Six Weeks release cycle:
We tried Basecamp's Six Weeks release cycle for about a year. While it worked out great for big releases, like our new iOS & Android app, it never really worked out for our web version, since we had to constantly update the platform almost every week.
Though the feature releases worked out well, we had the big conversion problem. Users loved the product, but they wanted things that we didn't necessarily have at that time.
Small daily updates
I am a big fan of James Clear's Atomic Habits. While I used to do things in small increments while working, it never really hit me to use that technique for our product development cycle. During one of our internal meetings, the idea of releasing small fixes or improvements everyday came up, and it connected back to the core concept of Atomic Habits.
Back in March this year, we switched to daily releases. This means:
- Everyday, we will make a small yet noticeable update to our user interface and user experience;
- Everyday, we will make a 5% performance improvement to the backend code;
- Everyday, we will identify and fix at least one bug that could come in the way of the users using the platform;
- Finally, at the end of the week, we will aggregate all these changes, and push out a release note to our users.
We stuck to this method since March, and I am super thrilled to see the results after two months. In May, we made
- 30% increase in our revenue (because of iframe embeds, and other customization options)
- 12% increase in user feedback submission (because of a UX change)
- 300ms faster response rate to our API calls from platforms like Intercom, which makes it faster for users to submit their feedback.
I am also tweeting the changes starting today, on @hellonexthq.
What did I learn here
One of the biggest learnings for me here was that small changes that we make everyday matters, which has directly impacted our users in a positive way, which is what matters to us as a business.
What development cycle/model are you following for your side project? Do you think I'm on the right track here?
Great progress!
Over the past years I have been trying to shorten my development cycle as much as possible. From half-yearly release cycles I went back to quarterly, monthly, weekly, and now I'm in the position to do release daily releases. In order to get into this position in the first place it's important to focus on several quality aspects, like you mentioned (& don't over-engineer).
I think the greatest thing about daily release cycles is that it requires only a limited amount of cognitive load, and empties the bin every day. The only downside I have found yet is that I'm currently able to build so much so fast, that I need to step aside for reflection every now and then. It's too easy to become a feature factory (lose track of long-term vision) or deplete your creative energy for the week.
You are right. As you rightly mentioned, you tend to clean out the cognitive load everyday, wake up fresh every morning, and think about the best way to fix something or implement something new.
I am also not sure if we could have gotten here, without having the experience of working in longer development cycles. Those long cycles definitely gave us a ton of time to iterate the development process and other aspects of the product. So when we gradually switched to daily code updates, we knew what exactly we should do and where. This is crucial, I believe.
It is way too easy to become a feature factory (I'm going to take this term to the team crediting you). We were that when we were on the longer dev cycles. Since the mind pushes you to automatically build new features to feel a sense of success. Now, we aren't focusing on that entirely. We have weekly targets, that gets broken down and executed daily. Even new features that take a month, are broken down into weeks, then into days before execution. Just an hour's worth of meeting is enough to arrive at this breakdown.
Anything else you've found to be interesting? We use Flow (https://getflow.com) to do these breakdowns and task management. What tool are you using to manage these @Corstian ?
I'm not the one who came up with the term of a 'feature factory'. Read a blog post about it here: https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory.
Besides that I'm just working alone, and I give myself quite a lot of flexibility when it comes to what I'm working on. Basically it's all about what I feel like doing for the day. In the end that too comes back to some natural cycle (some days I feel more like designing than bug fixing and vice versa), though I haven't yet discovered its rythm.
That's nice. The article is super interesting.
I get you. It used to be that when UnderstandBetter was in its early stages. As we started building a team, it started changing gradually.
Nice, like the quick cycles.
How often do you ab test your landing page? random question :)
We update every single day. Tweaking the landing pages, updating some content and such.