About a year ago Code Climate announced its Velocity offering which provides engineering insights. Today they are taking the wraps off Version 2.0 for everyone. Existing customers have already had access to many of the new features. I am writing about this today because the whole history of the Velocity offering is illustrative of the right way to launch a new product even when you are a company that already has a mature offering (Code Climate Quality).
Many organizations once they have a mature product fall into a trap. They can’t release something new because they can’t reset the dial to behaving like a startup. Instead of going out with an MVP and learning from customers they want to release something that matches the maturity of their other offerings. They often wind up not shipping at all or after a new startup has already come in and taken the field.
Code Climate did a terrific job avoiding this trap. Their initial release of Velocity was intentionally minimal in the best sense of the word (think first iPhone). It was no frills but provided meaningful value and many customers adopted it. The subsequent feature development has been guided by the needs of these customers culminating in today’s release.
If you are looking to enable your engineering team and processes with better insights and analytics, go and check out all the goodness that is now part of Code Climate Velocity 2.0.