Shipping mindsets between B2C and B2B products

Sometimes, when talking with engineers, it seems that the speed at which one is able to ship is a sort of vanity metric that supersedes other metrics.

Obviously a quick release cycle is great to have. Shorter times between ideation and getting users to try a feature. Such implies the ability of quickly and accurately assessing a feature's value, implementing and reviewing its implementation, testing and ultimately shipping it.

But ultimately, does your customer care you ship 10x a day? Are you running 4 experiments per sprint on 4 segments? If not, what's the advantage of such an airtight CI/CD pipeline?

I wonder if this mentality of shipping everyday is related to some form of dopamine addiction?

Maybe just a little bit.

Another possibility is that too much of what one reads in terms of amazing engineering, best practices and cutting edge techniques — which they are — are written by engineering teams of huge companies. They are well staffed and filled with brilliant people but, more importantly, these work on consumer products and I wonder if these practices make sense for any type of product, especially in B2B.

And we fall into this fallacy of "if Google and Uber and all of those guys do it, why not us?"

Does your user care? Does the paying customer care? If not, why do it? Why not have mid sprint releases? Or monthly? Or quarterly?

Ultimately, teams must ship at the speed they're comfortable with, without compromising the quality of their product. Yet it seems too many engineers aim at this goal of shipping daily without having worked on the fundamentals that allow for such cadence to be held safely.