Frequent releases increase feedback and confidence—but only when you’re ready for them.
Many teams want to release faster. Some even feel pressured to. They set up CI/CD pipelines, automate deployments, and start talking about daily pushes. But then things go sideways. Bugs slip through. Customers complain. The team’s stress level skyrockets.
That’s not because frequent releases are bad. It’s because frequent releases without discipline are dangerous.
Release frequency is the outcome—not the starting point
When I advocate for frequent releases, I’m not suggesting you rush in blindly. Releasing more often should be the natural result of other solid behaviors—like:
Know the problem you’re solving
Create simple things in small steps
Be meticulous about composition
Validate before, during, and after
Work together
If you skip those and just start releasing more frequently, you’re likely to increase risk, not reduce it. You’ll ship flawed solutions faster. And recover more slowly because you’re not set up to respond well.
“Ridiculously Often” is relative
The name is intentional.
If your current cadence is once every six months, releasing every three months might feel ridiculous. If you release monthly, switching to every two weeks may feel impossible. Weekly to daily? Absurd.
That’s the point.
The phrase Release Ridiculously Often is a mantra designed to break the inertia of long cycles. It’s not a mandate for everyone to push to production every 20 minutes. It’s a call to challenge your current cadence, whatever that may be. To find the edge of what feels possible—and then go just a little past it.
Over time, your goal is to approach continuous delivery. But you won’t get there in one leap. You get there by shaving 20% off, by halving batch size, by reducing the effort and risk in each release.
Composition must come first
I often walk into organizations where the codebase is tightly coupled. Changes in one area ripple through others. Everything needs to be tested together. And so, everything ships together.
In these environments, continuous integration and deployment pipelines may exist—but they feed an internal staging server. Releases still happen in large, coordinated batches. CI/CD in name only.
Before you can release more frequently, your system needs to support it. That means improving your composition. Decouple where you can. Refactor toward modularity. Introduce translation layers. If services are dependent on each other, they’re not really services—they’re a distributed module.
And if you’re not validating as you go? You’ll just be shipping more problems, faster.
Smaller steps change culture, too
Frequent releases aren’t just a technical shift. They’re a cultural one.
At first, people are cautious. They want to know what it means to release more often. Will they get blamed if something breaks? Are they being set up to fail?
But once the team sees it in action—once they experience what it’s like to release in small, safe increments and see that it’s okay—their confidence grows. Emotional energy lifts. A sense of accomplishment builds. Feedback loops shorten. Collaboration improves. Decision-making becomes easier.
When the releases are small, recovery is easy. You don’t fear breaking things—you fix them quickly.
That shift is powerful.
Where to start
If you want to move toward more frequent releases, don’t start by going faster. Start by setting yourself up for success.
Let the team know: we’re going to get this wrong at first, and that’s okay.
Pick a small part of your system you can release independently. Prove the model there.
Make sure you’re validating outcomes. Feedback is only helpful if you’re listening.
There’s some amount of release frequency you can achieve just by paying better attention and working more collaboratively. But eventually, you’ll hit a wall—and that’s when you’ll need to change how you build.
Think in smaller steps. Reduce your batch size. Improve your composition. Bring people closer together.
Then, and only then, should you push to release ridiculously often.
Further Reading
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations – Forsgren, Humble, Kim
Frequency Reduces Difficulty – Martin Fowler