[browningstreet]

I had a similar situation in fintech. We had 3 different release cycles and hosting farms for fast, medium and slow accepting customers. Fast went to the customers who didn't require approvals, and who were flex when it came to errors in the release. Then there was a medium channel where the other customers were fine as long as a couple of the major customers in that pack approved things. The slow channel basically was for customers who had large validation or training requirements associated with releases.

[cbono1]

Would this break down if you had 10 customers that would prefer the slow channel of release, but each had their own ever so slightly different desired release pace or training requirements?

[midnightmonster]

Key word "desired". Make the slow channel the longest reasonable time that any of them want. If they want shorter, well, there's medium channel or slow. You pick. If they want even longer, well, there's slow channel, and it's good enough for these 10 enterprise customers.

[browningstreet]

Yes.

There are always requests and negotiations in play. But those three channels sufficed almost all the time. At times we'd combine channels if there was an urgent need and agreement from customers.

The slowest customers were the most enterprise-y. Things almost couldn't go slow enough for them. When there were complications to the release process, they could be a release version or two behind and there'd be a catch-up release.

We also had customers outside all of this, and had custom releases, and we charged very high fees for this. Ultimately, we were able to bring them back into the slow release because the extra work wasn't really worth it. Part of the requirement for these kind of customers is to have additional engagement efforts to make sure their internal teams were really aware of the details and contingencies of releases. Big companies move slow and need over-communication, and you can't trust them to do it themselves. It was more effective to take that responsibility on ourselves.

I preferred to take the things that were difficult and do them more often. Keeping a cadence to things kept everyone together. The minute you break cadence -- and entertain special circumstances -- it's really hard to get back on cadence, and that cadence includes testing, notifications, documentation, feedback, approvals, releases.