"Cadence" is one of my favorite work-words, so I appreciate having it so well defined at a company level. Having a well organized, very repeatable cadence is essential to growth and that leadership needs to come from the top.

My one negative around this concept is the portrayal of Engineering as operating on quarterly release cycles. The most effective growth-oriented Product/Engineering teams know that a "quarterly release" concept is the LEAST efficient way to run their teams. The most effective teams are continuously planning and continuously releasing all the time.

With this continuous cadence, features release when they are ready, betas can begin and features can be put out into the wild to be "discovered". The quarterly "release" is simply a facade that highlights the "big rocks" that have been released sometime during the cycle before. A company can also high these features behind feature flags, or only produce limited release access, but this actually is detrimental as well since it doesn't allow Product to get sufficient post-production feedback before the final release.

I can be quite damaging to send the message to non-technical leaders that "one big quarterly release" is how Engineering teams should operate. Any team operating on that model is putting their company at much higher risk. One big quarterly "release" (announcement) is a great way to highlight the work, but us growth-minded CTOs definitely want to know that code is rock solid all working in production at scale before that announcement happens.