If you run a product company, you have to release new versions of your software. In the USA the mantra is “Never undermine your product”. Because of that, the most popular words in describing the software produced by your company are great, fabulous, fantastic, or simple the best. Important: never speak negative of your software. 

Say, you’re releasing the version N of your software product. Over the last six months your software engineers were working long ours trying to fix 159 critical bugs reported in Jira and 573 non-critical ones. Ten new features were added in this version, and finally Release N was pushed out the doors.

Your firm runs an annual conference for developers, and you are delivering a keynote about the new release N. This is how you should open the keynote (remember the mantra!).

“Hello guys,

Thank you for your continuous support of our Software. The version N-1 of our Software was fabulous. We are the leader in this market. But we wouldn’t be who we are if we wouldn’t be always trying to find new solutions and make our Software even better. The Release N is simply the best in this sector! Das ist fantastisch! 

The performance of the Software N-1 was always beating the competition. But we were able to tripple the speed of network communication in version N.  The UI in version N is the richest UI ever – we doubled the number of our UI components.” If you have time left, do a very light intro to the list of new features introduced in N. This will discourage some smarty pants from the audience from embarrassing you by asking geeky questions like “Have you resolved that showstopper bug in your rendering engine that crashed our application three times a day?” But if someone will ask you a question showing that this guy knows your software better than you, gust say politely, “We can take it offline. Just grab me in the corridor after the talk.” I can guarantee, that after giving such an answer no one will grab you anywhere.

Everyone knows that release N will reveal a bunch of new issues and the release N+1 will fix them and add something extra. But who cares what’s left behind? Look forward, move ahead, inflate your importance or else…

P.S. If you’ll ever hear me presenting a new software product of our company in such a manner, do not buy it from me. Most likely this software is full of crap as well as the presenter.