We’re at an inflection point for releasing software. Because of the sophisticated tooling available to engineering teams, it’s never been easier to innovate while minimizing risk. At the same time, many of the challenges that have always faced product development teams persist.
So, how do we move forward?
We recently hosted a conversation between LaunchDarkly CEO Dan Rogers and James Governor, Analyst and Co-founder of RedMonk, to discuss this topic and more.
You can watch the whole 30-minute video or read our takeaways below.
1. Software delivery is still a work in progress
If you’ve ever been part of a digital transformation, an agile transformation, or — well, any transformation — this statement may resonate with you: change is hard, and it takes time.
Despite (or perhaps due to) technology innovations, the landscape is still complicated for web developers. Progress happens slowly.
“We are 20 years into the DevOps revolution, and I can still go to a conference and do a DevOps 101 talk, and people will be excited to go. Because nobody has made it all the way there,” Governor said.
He used builds as an example of a process that we would think should be completely automated at every single company at this point. However, he routinely meets with companies where builds are still done manually.
2. We should never lose sight of delivering an outstanding user experience
There is a lot of lip service paid to the importance of user experience, but that doesn’t always filter through to day-to-day work.
Teams often spend a lot of time thinking about how to get code from the laptop to the server, but not enough time thinking about how to get it from the server to the user, Rogers proposed.
Governor agreed. “We should always be thinking about the user experience, but too often that’s an afterthought,” he said. The true measure of success lies in delivering a seamless, meaningful experience. As he put it, “mean time to dopamine” should be a guiding principle.
"We should always be thinking about the user experience, but too often that’s an afterthought." James Governor, Co-founder of RedMonk
3. Learn from failures: CrowdStrike and Sonos as case studies
Even industry leaders have stumbled with software releases that disrupted user experiences globally.
Governor highlighted Sonos as a company whose name is “synonymous with a great experience” who was recently in the news for shipping an update that “for many users, broke the experience.”
CrowdStrike is another fresh example of a company that may be known as best-in-class, but still managed to ship buggy code.
These incidents serve as a reminder of the high stakes of bad releases and the need for strategies like canary releases, feature flags, and blue-green deployments to minimize fallout.
4. Every team should be able to ship software on a Friday
This principle means having the confidence that comes from having the right processes and tools in place to release software without risk.
One of Governor’s strongest recommendations was this: If you can’t roll back, you shouldn’t ship.
The ability to revert changes quickly is essential for minimizing damage when things go wrong. This principle should guide every release strategy, ensuring teams can confidently deploy on any day—even on Friday afternoons.
5. Metrics and observability are key
Frameworks like DORA and SPACE offer valuable metrics—deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, and change failure rates—to benchmark software delivery performance.
“A coherent set of metrics is absolutely essential to becoming effective as a software delivery organization,” Governor emphasized.
Tying observability into these processes helps teams monitor real-time feedback and automate progressive delivery decisions, ensuring quality at every stage.
6. AI introduces new risks—and opportunities
With AI deeply integrated into modern software, new risks such as prompt injection and unintended outputs arise.
Governor explained that AI is non-deterministic, so you don’t know what you’re going to get. But this means we need to double down on the fundamentals.
He highlighted the importance of testing AI systems thoroughly and incorporating robust observability to ensure these applications deliver value without compromising user trust.
7. Cultural and technical change must go hand in hand
Governor noted that successful software delivery is as much about social transformation as it is about technical innovation. He cited Amazon’s “one-box deployments” as a model of combining technical practices with cultural buy-in.
To drive lasting change, organizations need both effective tools and a commitment to collaborative, quality-first engineering cultures.
“It’s more clear than ever that software release management is not something that is adjacent to the business, it is the business,” Governor said.
Creating this culture where teams are empowered and rewardied for shipping good software starts at the top. Rogers suggested that this means software development should move away from being something that happens “in a dark closet” to something that everyone in the C-suite has visibility into, and which is respected as a strategic lever for the business.
Governor agreed, but cautioned that we have a long way to go to reach that ideal state.
“The critical importance of software delivery is not generally a board-level concern,” he said. “Or if it is, they don’t necessarily have the skills to ask the right questions to make sure these departments have better processes.”
"It’s more clear than ever that software release management is not something that is adjacent to the business, it is the business." James Governor, Co-founder of RedMonk
Conclusion
Software release management isn’t just about technology—it’s about creating delightful experiences, minimizing risk, and fostering a culture of excellence.
“Generating code is easy. Shipping code that we can trust and rely on and that creates a great experience for our users…that’s the bit that’s hard,” Governor said.
As AI accelerates software proliferation, following the fundamental principles of release management are more critical than ever. This means focusing on progressive delivery, observability, and rollback readiness to maximize your opportunity to innovate—while also minimizing risk.
Check out all of the videos and articles about product updates unveiled at Launch Week .
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