Decoding Mark Zuckerberg's Product Strategy: "Ship Frequently". Part-B: How to Implement Real "Ship Daily"? *

The "secrets" that almost everyone and software companies can achieve—but the real challenge lies in changing the mindset, and followed by action.

Whether you like him or not, Mark Zuckerberg is an exceptional software engineer and immensely successful entrepreneur. I’ve shared the video below in Part A, and it’s worth rewatching with the above two perspectives in mind:

There were no books or documentation detailing how Facebook implemented “Ship to Production Daily,” i.e., Real Agile/DevOps. The following is my analysis, based on publicly available news/information and my own journey.

Table of Contents:

• The Advice is just for Yourself

• Facebook’s Secret to “Shipping Frequently”: E2E Test Automation

• Facebook Adopted E2E Test Automation Starting with Watir and then WebDriver

• The Advice is just for Yourself

• Facebook’s Strategy for Kickstarting Real E2E Test Automation: Luring External Talent

• How can an average software company successfully kickstart real E2E Test Automation and move towards "Ship Frequently"?

The Advice is just for Yourself

You can follow my advice below and implement “ship frequently” at your project level for your own benefits—whether it's job security, promotion, or more importantly, upskilling for the day you build your startup or side hustles. However, a word of caution: If you're just an employee, better not to promote and attempt to change your company’s culture.

Keep in mind that Mark Zuckerberg is the founder. If you're working at a company, your CEO or CIO is likely more focused on short-term financial gains rather than the company's long-term future—much like the executives at MySpace were.

Source: Forbes (2011)

Professional managers can find countless reasons to dismiss suggestions that might bring disrupting changes (good or bad). The fact: John Lasseter, creator of ‘Toy Story’ and Pixar, was fired at Disney after suggesting ‘Digital Animation’, which of course was correct.

“News Corp tried to guide MySpace, to add planning, and to use "professional management" to determine the business's future. That was fatally flawed when competing with Facebook which was managed in White Space, lettting the marketplace decide where the business should go.”

”Unfortunately, MySpace demonstrates a big fallacy of modern management. The belief that smart MBAs, with industry knowledge, will perform better”
- How Facebook Beat MySpace (Forbes, 2011).

Facebook’s Secret to “Shipping Frequently”: E2E Test Automation

I've never worked at Facebook, nor am I friends or colleagues with high-level engineers there. My statement is based on common sense and publicly available information from Facebook.

Anyone can ship software daily, but the real challenge is delivering high-quality builds to production without running into major issues. A recent bad example is Sonos.

Effective E2E Test Automation Could Have Saved the Sonos CEO’s Job

The solution is, of course, Automated End-to-End Regression Testing. Wired reported LinkedIn’s implementation of ‘Shipping-Daily” (with top executive’s direct involvement): “pushes out updates multiple times per day”. For more, check out “The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits”.

As a former research scientist, I have a habit of using 2+ sources to support my statement.