Friday 2016-10-14

Gojko Adzic talked about what happens when continuous delivery meets marketing.

CD means that features release all the time, but his marketing team wanted to be able to make full releases so they could have their release parties and marketing blitzes. To make that work, he ended up taking his CD process off-line from the perspective of his customers.

Ultimately, that's the bargain he had to strike to marry his 21st century development processes to his 20th century batch marketing processes.

Alternatively, he could have pushed the marketing team to catch up with the dev team. Of the two groups of potential customers, i.e. your competitor's customers and not-yet-anyone's customers, the marketing team should know which feature-set will be most likely to sway which customer into becoming your customer.

The two big benefits of this are: 1) as new CD features pick up new customers each week, the work-load of onboarding customers then becomes more evenly distributed over time. And 2) the company gets better information about feature traction, since the data is no longer aggregated into huge releases.

A lot of their marketing processes will have to change, and it will likely to be quite painful. However it's worth making the effort to keep all parts of a company working at least in the same century.