Mountainsides — Postlight

Rich Ziade of Postlight shares a delightful diagram outlining, roughly, Postlight’s approach to delivery: “the Mountainside.” Check out the image and fuller description through the link. What I appreciate about this visual is that it gives some sense of movement, of how a product moves toward an “end” (though that’s a problematic descriptor), while also acknowledging the continual involvement of all the people on a multidisciplinary team.

Ziade ends with this lovely, human description of software delivery (which is just another word for “doing business in our digital age”):

The mountainside is a clear declaration that the software development effort — all the way from conception to launch — is a messy endeavor. The key to tapping the value behind all that great talent is to acknowledge and embrace that chaos.

Don’t get confused: We have timelines, commitments, and deadlines. People get desks and laptops and work steady hours. We also work closely with our clients and sometimes they like to do daily standups and follow orthodox agile, and we do that too.

We’re not trying to reinvent work. We like our work! We just want to tell the truth, to ourselves and to our clients: The line to the finish is never straight. It’s more like a set of gently overlapping hills of interlocking effort. Or as we like to call it, The Mountainside.