Comment by superfrank

I'm not sure I agree with you.

I think a better definition of shipping is ensuring your project meets the definition of done. At big companies, for many projects, I think there's an implicit requirement in the definition of done that management is aware of and somewhat happy with what you shipped. The resources used to ship a project (the time, money, and people) are, after all, their resources.

I feel like you're getting at the fact that you can build a crappy product that management loves and build something customers love that management hates. I don't disagree with that at all, but to me that's kind of tangential to whether you've shipped a project or not. To me at least, shipping isn't about it being good or bad, it's just about it being done. I think what the article is getting at is that if management doesn't agree that it's done, then it's not really done.