For decades, software product development used to follow a Waterfall model which relied on a team's ability to ideate new features, vet them using product sense, build and ship them. This model usually resulted in multi-year release cycles and resulted in big-bang releases paired with Version bumps.

This has changed quite dramatically in the last decade where teams have moved to a continuous iteration model where product teams measure the impact of their changes and improve the product incrementally over and over. This model was introduced with the shift to web domain and popularized by data-centric companies like Facebook, Airbnb, etc.