Shipping is in our DNA
A fundamental principle we have ingrained into our DNA in Product Development is centred upon shipping, it is critical in guiding us to achieve our mission and sets our pace as a company.
What do we mean when we say shipping?
Shipping is not about sending goods in freight containers across the sea. It is about getting changes to our product into customers’ hands and solving their problems. Shipping is not a launch. The Collections launch last autumn consisted of thousands of incremental changes(or ships) that multiple teams made to our platform. This created a launch that was one of our calmest, most successful, and most innovative.
Quite often, shipping new products and features is seen as an end–a milestone that has been reached and a time to move on to the next project or team. However, we see this as only the beginning of the feedback loop that validates any assumptions or ideas we may have. How often we ship value to our customers is therefore viewed as a proxy for the overall health of our company — Shipping is life.
Here is our principle:
🚀 Pace with Pragmatism
We ship early and often to get our ideas in front of users quickly so that we can learn and iterate. We know that the best way to reach our goals is to ship small batches and iterate incremental changes that continuously build a better experience.
We’ll make our time here count and strive to be pragmatic about how we solve problems, our purpose is to deliver the maximum impact as quickly as possible. We make decisions with a bias for action and a can-do attitude. We don’t build things for the sake of building them.
How often an engineering group can deliver shapes the ways of working in other departments of an organisation. For example, a company that can only ship once per year has to operate within a completely different set of constraints than a company that is shipping once per hour.
The more we can safely and reliably ship changes to our customers, the fewer constraints and complications we place on the rest of the organisation. Safety is very important, we gradually roll out features incrementally to users and monitor feedback, errors, and usage as we deliver our work. We have examples of this from 2022, where we did not plan specific product initiatives anywhere on our radar, which in 2023 our now significant growth drivers for our business.
The greater the frequency at which we can deliver change to our customers on behalf of our company, the greater our ability to experiment and move the dial. The more rapidly we can experiment, the tighter a feedback loop we can create. This allows us to quickly identify both the opportunities we should continue to pursue, as well as weed out ideas that turn out to be less valuable.
Industry benchmarks show that shipping frequency correlates to business performance, the top 25% of companies in that survey ship “just” 40 times per month. Back in 2015, we’d ship once every 3 months. In 2019, on a good month, we would ship 40 times. In January of 2023, we shipped 460 times. To give you an idea of the kinds of things we ship, below is a particle example of a stinker we received yesterday about the new client list we are rolling out. Within ~5 hours of getting feedback from a salon, we made the change, shipped it, and let the customer know.
We are doing a lot of heavy lifting on our platform, how often we ship will only increase 🙂
The discipline it takes to get to the level we are at is not something to be brushed over. It’s highly complex and requires deep coordination and discipline. I’m really proud of everyone single person who works each day to get us operating at what I can only describe as excellence — that goes beyond Product Development, every person who supports us in managing and operating the software is involved.
Please reach out to me if you ever want to learn more or chat about shipping — john@phorest.com
Shipping is life…
