Frequent Releases allows for more Frequent Feedback
Studies from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group show that teams practicing frequent releases consistently outperform others, not just in speed and stability, but in customer satisfaction.
Whether you’re still figuring out your general product offering or you are enhancing and adding capabilities to a well established product, the ultimate test of whether or not you’ve hit the mark (or are at least trending in the right direction), is how your audience engages with what you’ve created. Yes, you can (and should) do market research before designing and coding up a potential solution to an identified problem, but the only way to know for certain, is to see what happens when your concepts come in contact with your audience.
Frequent Feedback enables Better Decisions
The more often your concepts come in contact with your audience, the more often you get feedback. This might sound obvious, but here’s the thing: feedback in real-time helps you understand what users actually want, not just what you thought they wanted. According to Accelerate (a highly recommended read if you haven’t already checked it out) by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, high-performing teams use short feedback loops to get a clearer picture of what’s working and what’s not. Faster feedback means you’re making decisions based on reality, not assumptions.
The quality of your future decisions improves based on how frequently you get feedback about your past decisions. Simply put, better feedback means better, data-driven choices.
Better Decisions result in Better Outcomes
For me, the outcomes I care about are about the societal benefits, the need we are meeting, or the community we are fostering. Money. Sure. We need money to continue operating - like we need food to continue living. I just don’t think money should be the focus of a company as I don’t think eating should be the focus of an individual.
Regardless, we all have outcomes we are after - the reason(s) the organization was started and the reason(s) the organization continues to exist.
The better our decisions, guided by our pursuit of those outcomes, the more likely we are to achieve the outcome and the better we will be at doing so.
Frequent feedback leads to better decisions which help teams stay aligned with the desired outcomes and respond to changes in the market. It also happens to be great for morale—seeing the results of your work is a huge motivator. Frequent feedback connects the team more often to the impact they’re having, which encourages innovation and a tighter focus on what matters.
Sure, Doc. But what about the risks?
Right. The risks. This is a valid concern – one that I’ve helped many organizations with before.
One of the biggest fears is pushing defects into production. And in a lot of organizations, this is a big risk. They already have a long backlog of unresolved defects and uptime issues. The natural tendency would be to release less often and with more rigor.
Half of that tendency is spot on; the latter half - more rigor. This is why “Release Ridiculously Often” comes later in the list of behaviors. If we know the problem we are trying to solve, we create simple things in small steps, we are meticulous about composition, and we validate before, during, and after, then we make it more safe to release ridiculously often. You can actually release code without having it turn into a fire drill every time.
DORA’s research backs this up: elite DevOps teams—those releasing code multiple times a day—aren’t just fast; they also maintain high stability and quality. It’s all about using tools and practices that reduce the chance of things going wrong. With automated testing, you’re catching bugs before they go live, and feature flags let you control what users see, so you can safely test in production. Here’s a solid summary of DORA’s findings on high-performing teams.
In summary
Frequent releases are a way to connect with real users, get frequent feedback, learn faster, improve decisions, adapt quickly, and achieve better outcomes. By putting some of the other behaviors in place first, you can manage releases without sacrificing quality and dramatically reduce the risk while increasing the benefits.
Releasing Ridiculously Often can help organizations become more responsive, informed, and aligned with customer needs.