Product Release Planning Survey— Preliminary Results

5 min readMay 31, 2020

I’m doing research on how companies plan their product releases.

And just to be clear, when I say release, I’m talking about the software they’re going to ship. i.e. it’s not the launch (more marketing-centric process), but the work that goes on BEFORE they commit to build significant new capabilities.

Please add your input

I’m still looking for input so please add your voice to the data if you haven’t done so already.

The link is here. Thanks in advance for your input.

bit.ly/ReleasePlanningSurvey

The survey only takes 5 minutes (or less) to complete — so please help out. I’ll publish the detailed results here on Medium in the future, once I get a sufficient set of results.

I’m sharing some of the feedback now because I see some patterns emerging that I think are important, but want to collect more data before published detailed results.

The Early Results

Company Size

The data has come from companies of all sizes. About 1/3 are startups and almost 1/4 are small companies less than $100M in revenue. The remainder are medium, large and very large (over $1B in revenue) enterprises. This is a healthy spread of companies to look at

Company Type

There are different types of companies represented as well. The biggest group are ISVs at almost 50%, and IT orgs within an enterprise (20%). The remainder is a mix of Ecommerce, Consulting/Agency, Not For Profit and others such as HealthTech companies, Payments companies etc.

Respondent Titles

There is a good mix of respondents. The vast majority are either Product Manager/Owners or Executives. The following are the details:

Product Manager/Product Owner — 68%
Executive (VP or C-Level) — 21%
Others (Scrum Master, Developer/Engineer, Project Manager, Designer etc.) — 11%

Development Methodology

This was interesting to see. Just over 40% state they are “Fully Agile”, while over 50% are some mix of Agile/Waterfall, with the skew towards more Agile than Waterfall. The remainder gave responses including SAFe, “it depends”, iterative etc.

Release Frequency

Companies varied significantly in how often they release MAJOR functionality. The vast majority (almost 60%) are at some frequency between every month to 6 months, and almost 20% are looking at 6 months or more between major releases. Also at almost 20% are some companies releasing every 1–4 weeks. Finally a tiny number (3%) are releasing ultra-frequently at multiple times per week.

Well Defined Release Planning Process

Almost 30% (Disagree or Strongly Disagree) of companies stated they did not have a well-defined release planning process. And if you include Neutral, it hits about 42%. That is a surprisingly large number for something so fundamental to overall software success.

Well Understood Prioritization Process

Prioritizing work is fundamental to planning. Surprisingly, just under 50% of the respondents agreed that they have a well understood prioritization process. This means that in about 1/2 the companies, prioritizing what is most important and where focus should lie is done in a fashion that many don’t understand.

Key Challenges Faced

The following are some of the challenges people face in planning software releases. There are a variety of challenges listed but some patterns are also evident.

Managing executive expectations.
Alignment. Getting the business to drive releases rather than product
Autonomous teams making releases that don’t ladder with and towards Product Strategy. Can’t articulate customer value and hard to get a sense if teams are moving towards larger corporate goals. Estimates are always off.
We are painfully going through a transition to Agile (ironically from something they called Agile, but was really more “do what the hell we want”) hence the many neutral/disagree entries
Executives who constantly challenge the estimates of teams
Acknowledgement within PM and enterprise that there should be discipline and transparency in the process. Currently, it’s very subject to recency bias even though releases only once a year.
The over-focus on output instead of outcomes.
Bugs that delay scheduled releases, releases that need to align between multiple teams
Last minute changes/additions to the release because of a large customer experiencing a serious issue or wanting a feature.
The product management discipline and mindset are relatively new to our organization. As such, it is my job to start implementing some of these disciplines.
Conflict between engineers’ desire and ability to release code at any time (CI/CD processes) and the company’s desire to deploy new features to end users on a more predictable, pre-planned schedule.
Customer escalations, sales escalations, other unanticipated developments always whiplash our priorities. Inability to “say no” at exec level.
Feature farm conflicts/thinking from leadership
Co-ordination across product teams proves very very difficult. We’re struggling to solve.

Please fill out the survey

Thanks for reading the preliminary results. If you work in software (and ISV, Enterprise IT, Ecommerce etc. ) please add your voice and experience to the survey. As mentioned above, once I have enough data, I will share the results publicly with additional detail and information.

The link is here. Thanks in advance.