Burndown: A Better Way To Build Products

On one end, we have “Quick ship” releases, which are small, highly incremental just-in-time releases. On the other end , we have “Big Bang” releases. These are giant, long undertakings that attempt to have every detail thought through and perfectly executed.

Burndown is the framework that Drift uses to employ the first principles of Responsive Development.

It’s iterative: The first attempt is always wrong. You must iterate towards the best possible solution, not try to get it on the first try. It’s rapid: Speed gives you more iterations and more opportunities to learn. It’s visual: Plans, progress, and updates are done with screenshots and visuals so everyone can see what the end result will look lik

If we were to build a new version of the Drift customer dashboard – lets call it “Dashboard 2.0” – we ’d have two options: We could ship the entire thing at once and take two weeks to do that, or… We could ship five different incremental updates to customers in two-day bursts.

We measure customer adoption, usage, & retention on a daily basis. We believe that an iterative model that evolves quickly based on feedback wins.

As you start scrolling to the right on the Trello board , you’ll come across red labels, which are used to signify that design work is still needed for that list.

What are the first principles of Responsive Development? It’s flexible: It’s based on principles, not rules. Rules are binding. Principles favor progress and forward momentum. It’s customer-driven: Always gather first-hand feedback, not second-hand feedback. Get engineers and designers talking directly to customers.

It’s focused: Iterations should be focused, self-contained, and have as few dependencies as possible.

Product management’s role is to gather vast amounts of customer feedback and great examples of how others solve the challenges that customers face today.