How To Release Without Fear

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We can’t all afford platform teams and release trains, but perhaps we’ll get there one day if we can avoid committing prod incident seppuku 🗡️.

Startups are a rollercoaster.

Move fast and break things is the mantra, and sacrificing (some!) quality to maximise velocity is the name of the game. YOLO-ing a release to 100% of your users at 11pm is part of the fun.

Releasing is the hardest problem on mobile.

You can’t just deploy a fix like you can on web or backend. Apple and Google gate your releases via App Review™, so you have no guarantee of shipping your fix quickly. Without dedicated QA, your first sign of a production incident might just be when Twitter blows up.

This is cute when you have a few hundred DAUs (daily active users). You and your cofounder can apologetically ship a release over the weekend to your understanding cult of early adopters.

The risk profile changes as you scale up.

At about 10-100k DAUs, production incidents become existential: if a core feature is inaccessible, there’s a widespread crash, or your users all get logged out, growth nosedives and you’ll have to go back to Amazon.

I’ve spent 5 years in mobile at early-stage startups, and I’ve lost a lot of sleep to P1 alerts. For my own sanity, I’ve created a few novel approaches to app releases so we can move fast without breaking things.

Not today, Bezos.

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