Many companies are building deployment organizations, and much discussion has emerged on the concept of forward-deployed engineering in the modern startup era. Far less attention has gone to the operating systems that enable deployments to become a good business.
In manufacturing, Wright’s law postulates that as cumulative production increases, unit costs tend to fall. If we think of deployments as distributed factories, we would expect the same pattern. As deployment volume grows, each deployment should become faster, better, and less expensive.
In practice, many teams experience the reverse. More deployments stretch scarce resources, multiply handoffs, strain coordination, and create more one-off work. Quality degrades while costs and cycle times rise.
The Deployment Paradox
We call this the Deployment Paradox. Deployment organizations should theoretically become more efficient with growth, but an increase in volume alone does not create economies of scale. Without systems that capture what teams learn and turn it into repeatable processes, organizations can scale deployment volume while throughput and quality decline and costs rise.
We see deployment organizations as operating decentralized factories, coordinating more deployment teams while increasing quality and throughput per unit of deployment capacity and reducing cycle time and cost per deployment. We believe building these systems is the most important work of a successful deployment company and how we are working to solve the Deployment Paradox.
We still have many questions and are curious to hear from you if you have opinions or experience on any of this. If you read something and disagree with it, we especially want to hear from you.
The Six Pillars of Success
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If you’re thinking about any of this, we want to hear from you
All of our conversations are anonymized and our findings will be shared with you as we put together our lessons from dozens of conversations. Our goal is to write a manual that any deployment company can refer to regardless of what the shape or product of their business looks like.