In his article Engineering Maturity Model Mike Fisher shares how he thinks about the importance of different team capabilities when building software organizations. Despite how some maturity models—such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)—have been misused in the past, Mike encourages us to look past the process and focus on the principles. Here’s the important part:

[The layers] aren’t stages in that you’re never really finished with any of them but you do need to have the ones at the base stronger and more developed than the ones further up or else you are certain to run into problems. […]

While I do think of this kind of like a maturity model, they are not stages that one achieves and moves on from. These are areas that one must keep returning to and keep investing in, always from the bottom up. Getting over your skis and investing too much in the top, which is very tempting for startups, is fraught. Too many product development teams without continued investment in the infrastructure or deployment pipeline can slow everyone down, proving Brooks’s Law. The important task for Engineering leaders is to determine when and how much investment gets made into each of these layers.

To put it another way, if the base of your infrastructure and deployment pipeline is shaky, an increased focus on product development is eventually going to bring the whole house down. Click through to the article to see Mike’s full model.