From 6-month Releases to Release Whenever—with Egil Osthus, CEO at Unleash

In this episode, Egil Osthus, CEO and co-founder of Unleash, joins Katerina to talk about how enterprise teams can move away from rigid, high-risk release cycles to safer, faster, and more iterative delivery. Egil shares how he led a 500-person engineering org from quarterly (and even yearly) releases to a deploy-whenever model—despite legal constraints, stakeholder objections, and legacy systems.

They talk through the real-world playbook: how to manage stakeholder expectations, start small, build trust, and keep momentum with early wins. From feature flags to feedback loops, this episode is packed with practical strategies for engineering leaders who want to modernize release processes without triggering chaos.

What You’ll Learn

- How to shift from long release cycles to frequent, low-risk deployments

- Why stakeholder alignment is more important than technical tooling

- How to introduce change without triggering resistance

- Practical strategies for starting small and building trust across the org

- The role of feature management in enabling safer, iterative delivery

- How better feedback loops can improve product direction and team focus

- Why most developers already know this is the right way—and what’s still blocking them

- How to win over skeptics by reframing big changes as small experiments

- What leaders often get wrong about risk in modern release strategies

Egil Osthus is the CEO and co-founder of Unleash, an open-source feature management platform used by enterprises to ship software faster and safer. He’s an experienced engineering leader with a background in developer tools, large-scale software delivery, and organizational transformation.

Before starting Unleash, Egil held multiple leadership roles at Visma, one of Europe’s largest SaaS companies, where he led product development across international teams and drove the transition from long release cycles to continuous delivery.

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