Change is inevitable. Change for the sake of change is wasted effort. But you deal with change every day, in every part of your life. And the rate of change is accelerating, so your adaptation needs to speed up, too. New products used to take decades to make their way into the hands of the majority of users. Now we see new products launch and gain millions of users overnight. We can’t use our old ways of working to sustain that.

We’re not here to give you certainty, or assurance, we’re here to help you work with change instead of being worked over by it.

Progressive Delivery is a set of practices to get the right users the right thing at the right time in a way that is sustainable for everyone. Yes, everyone. This includes executives in the boardroom, leaders managing departments, engineers, designers, product managers, marketers, partners, and most importantly – the actual product users. 

Progressive Delivery is a way to understand what you’re already doing, so you can do it more effectively.

Progressive Delivery is not about tools, and it’s not about certifications. It’s about what you care about and where your organization places focus. It’s more of a lens than a prescription. Products are not only the point in time when we deliver to a user, but a thriving conversation where building, use, and retirement are all visible and trackable.

Once you start seeing the world in terms of progressive delivery, you see it everywhere – ripe mangos in midwest supermarkets and tap-to-pay parking meters, Calendly links and same-day electronics delivery. It looks like convenience to us as users, but on the provider side, it takes a combination of investment, will, and effort. 

What is progressive delivery?

What do we mean when we say “Progressive Delivery”? Like every buzzy technical term, it’s going to be redefined as people actually use it and grapple with how it applies to them. It’s a way to get curious about the whole lifecycle of your product, including after it leaves your control.

Progressive delivery asks: 

• What is your definition of finished? 
• What do you expect to happen?
• What if your users want a different cadence of change?
• How are you stewarding the information you collect?
• How are you incorporating feedback?
• Who are ALL your constituents?

We have found four inflection points that organizations need on the way to Progressive Delivery: abundance, autonomy, alignment, and automation. Here are our definitions for this project:

Abundance

Do you have enough resources to do what you want? That’s abundance. “Enough” may define money, time, humanpower, clean water, physical health. 

In a computer sense, when software started to merge with business, we were limited by computing power, and finite storage, and distribution speed. Compiling took hours, testing took weeks. Cloud computing enabled by virtualization solved that problem, while also creating others. For progressive delivery, our systems need to have enough capacity to avoid constraints.

Autonomy

Can you do your job without waiting for other people? Being able to deposit a check after the bank is closed or change a business process without a meeting means that you have autonomy.

When Git and containers became available, they ushered in a trend of microservices and distributed systems. Developers could build faster without waiting for other teams – they were autonomous. Decoupling teams and using service agreements and expectations instead of forcing the whole organization to move at the same speed allows everyone to perform better. 

Alignment

Do you know what you’re trying to accomplish? Do you have clear goals, and do other people share those goals with you?

When teams are less co-located and interdependent, it is easier for them to drift away from a shared vision and output. We can’t settle for the old measurements about how many widgets were produced – we need to know how each team is doing, and how they are interacting. DevOps was a software movement to use people, process, and technology together to improve outcomes, and the success of that movement was solidified by the research of the DORA group.

Automation

Does your system “just work”? Can you assume that your train will arrive in time to get you to work, or that your pictures will be safe in the cloud, or that your grocery store will have milk? That is automation working to deliver goods and services predictably.

When you have abundance, autonomy, and alignment, you are approaching operational excellence. The way to lock in those victories and free up capacity for further improvement is to automate everything known and predictable. Automation is both a force-multiplier and a training tool for new teammates.

Each of these “A’s” reinforces and enables progress in the others. None of them is something that can be fully finished – you can always automate a little more, or a re-alignment will reveal a way for a team to become more autonomous.