July 18, 2025

Dotan Tamir

Read Time: ~5 minutes

<aside> 📌 At Empower Tilt, we seek individuals who challenge personal assumptions, value ownership and trust, and strive for excellence to inspire and empower their team. If this article connected with you, join our team!

Join Empower Tilt.

</aside>

<aside> 📎 At Empower Tilt, a data-driven fintech startup, our lifeblood is understanding our users and how they interact with our products. To do that effectively, we need to get new features and product updates into their hands fast. If you've ever worked in a startup, you know the pace is exhilarating, and the need for speed is paramount. For our iOS team, that meant taking a hard look at our release process. We went from a painstaking weekly manual ordeal to a highly automated, almost "set it and forget it" system that allows us to iterate at lightning speed.

</aside>

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5bzf8z9QYnABRhqnYMHA7H?si=3f0376d6b5ab4e98

The Old Way: A Manual Marathon

Think back to the "good old days" – maybe not so good for our release pilot! We used to aim for one iOS release a week. Sounds manageable, right? Not when each step was a manual dance, guided by a Notion checklist.

Here's a peek at what our weekly ritual looked like:

• Cutting the Release Branch: A new branch for each release.
• App Version Bump: Manually updating the version number.
• Ticket Identification: Sifting through tickets to see what made the cut.
• Release Notes & Assets: Manually updating all the user-facing details.
• Azure Board Query: Creating specific queries for QA regression and release notes.
• Triggering Builds: Kicking off separate QA (pointing to dev) and Release Candidate (pointing to production) builds.
• Team Communication: Sending out alerts about the upcoming release, highlighting any potential risks.