About two years before this, there were no norms about how we release features. People were just making up release types, and it was pretty chaotic. There was a lot of time wasted in meetings trying to figure out what we were launching and why. Marketing, education, and sales might be asking, "Can we sell this? How should we market this?" And get a response like, "No, we're only testing it with five people." How would they know that?

So about a year ago, I started trying to solve this problem. I named the types of releases and created a v1 of this guide that was very process-oriented. That was useful for our GTM teams, who needed to understand roles and responsibilities, but there were still a lot of gaps and missing pieces, even though it was much more complex than what you see here. I created today's version with our new CTO, Alan, who said, "This has to be anchored on entry and exit criteria, not process."

These phases generally apply to our Tier 1, 2, and 3 releases, which are our biggest ones. There should always be some sort of alpha testing, and then a slightly larger rollout for bug testing, before GA.

Tier 4s usually only take a sprint or two, so they don't have to go through all these phases. We call them "quality of life paper cuts" because they're small, quick, and easy.

When we released features before, we were anchoring on what we were building, not what signal we were getting. Anchoring on entry and exit criteria has really shifted our focus to things like the number of people testing and using the feature, how satisfied they are with it, how many bugs does it have, etc. That signal can tell you if you're on the right track, if you should pivot, or you're ready to go to the next phase.

Jiaona Zhang

Allan Leinwand

Nora Danskey

I created these guidelines to strengthen communication and ultimately save time as my team tests and releases new product features at Webflow. 

 Use these release guidelines going forward.

- We appreciate that it’s impossible to predict exactly how a new feature will impact our customers and product, so we test with real users as a way to increase our confidence that we’re building a feature that meets customers needs and is technically feasible

Build Trust with Strategic Customers/Partners 

- Webflow’s best growth is via Word of Mouth, and one way to encourage that is to make our strategic customers and partners feel like they’re a part of our build process. They can then be our champions and also offer quotes that can be used at GA to better describe the value.

Release Guidelines at Webflow

Release Naming Guide

OBJECTIVES OF EARLY RELEASES

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