Delivery as a software product

When building software products, we tended to form long-lived teams around them. The team would be responsible for the product throughout its life. During the initial build and subsequent revisions, they handled the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) end-to-end, including delivery into production. These teams were also often responsible for managing the production environment and providing support.

The scale of the product, and how widely it was adopted, determined whether it was managed by a single software team or by a network of teams all working for one product group. One thing that was noticeable about software product teams, apart from their long-lived nature, was that they often had good relationships with their customers as well as technology and operations staff. Sometimes they even had representatives of these groups within the teams.

Funding these products often took place on a yearly cycle, which coincided with setting the objectives for the product's development that year. A key thing to note is that the budget would often be allocated to fund the team(s) and the decisions on what features would be developed, enhanced, or fixed that year would be managed by the team itself.