As I returned to Atlanta from Barcelona this week, I had the pleasure of experiencing Atlanta's new international customs area. If you haven't been through the new terminal yet, it is truly beautiful. It is lined with great art that is educational (floor to ceiling stained glass reflecting slide views of wood veneers) and promotional (photos of many of the places in Georgia). Glowing ceiling lights illuminate the tunnel on your way to customs while soft zen music plays.
What made it a product management moment was the division of customers. (I use the word CUSTOMERS although I don't know that USCIS would every think of us as CUSTOMERS- that's a different blog.) Individuals entering customs were divided into two groups, those connecting through Atlanta and those with Atlanta as a final destination. Those of us with Atlanta as a final destination had the pleasure of using the new customs area, those that were connecting were shuffled to the old E terminal to connect to their flights. Of the 92 Million passengers that travel through Atlanta at least 2/3rd of these passengers are connecting passengers. So the majority of visitors to the Atlanta airport will not experience this beautiful new space. This reminded me of many a software practice where software is released, but under circumstances in which only a handful of customers can take advantage of it's features or version.
As product managers we are the owners of our product roadmaps. Too often though we allow upgrade and migration requirements to fall to the bottom of our requirement priorities; opting to focus on getting new and exciting features to market first. Developing a strong upgrade process for new releases requires planning proper development techniques, the right architectural approach and investment in solid upgrade utilities. It also requires the dedication at at difficult time in the development process, usually between a first and second version when we are often faced with an enormous backlog of requirements from the new market. As owners of SaaS products, this upgrade strategy becomes a must. When we OWN the environment for our customer's software without an upgrade strategy that brings our entire customer base to the new version in a flash cut, we are increasing our companies overhead exponentially by version. Version proliferation and technical debt may not seem daunting initially, but with a quarterly and/or monthly release schedule the costs quickly add up.
Therefore good readers, I recommend that with any green field development you begin your upgrade planning with release one and lay the foundation early. If you haven't developed such a strategy and look at your portfolio and see a string of versions and (server farms) its time to hit the pause button and execute a strategy to consolidate.
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