Photo by Patrick Konior on Unsplash

A maturity model for shipping fast without breaking customer trust.

I made an earlier argument that deploying code and releasing a feature are not the same event, and that treating them as one causes unnecessary risk. That argument still holds. But the environment it was written for has changed.

AI-assisted development has made writing and shipping code dramatically cheaper. A change that used to take a sprint now takes an afternoon. That’s a genuine gain, but it doesn’t automatically make the judgment around releasing that change any faster or better. When the cost of producing change drops and the discipline around exposing change doesn’t rise to match it, the result is exactly what customers are describing: things move, break, or reappear differently, without warning, more often than they can absorb.

Photo by Patrick Konior on Unsplash

We need to talk about how we ship software. Not because we’re doing it wrong, but because we can do it so much better, for our customers, for our colleagues, and for ourselves.

The Core Problem: Deployment Isn’t Release

Here’s the shift we need to make: deploying code and releasing features are not the same thing, and they shouldn’t happen at the same moment.