[dirtyaura]

An excellent piece. I’m especially interested to hear stories from the fellow HNers about the last point Jocelyn mentions: how to build 2 shipping cultures inside one company, when your business requires it (for example: two-sided marketplaces with different apps for consumer and businesses).

In our case, we have this situation with SW vs HW shipping culture. On the SW side, we focus on continuously developing features and have deliberately emphasized productivity over schedule-predictability, while on the HW side they naturally are focused more on schedule-predictability due to complex dependencies.

Now, this dichotomy has created an interesting discussions inside the company on the right way to ship products and projects, and to me, arguments mainly come from the fact that people come from the different shipping culture and have hard time to see the benefits and requirements of the other culture.

[Mertax]

I also come from a company that ships both HW & SW products. Our HW roots are much deeper than our SW roots and HW shipping mentalities have mostly prevailed (low risk tolerance, waterfall development, strict schedule).

Where we’ve had success is identifying the difference between SW that supports the hardware vs independent SW products that compliment the HW, and choosing to ship those products with different processes. Basically if the SW can support a recurring revenue model it follows a continuous development process. But if the software is really just the “operating system” for the hardware then it ships very much the way the rest of HW ships.