Doc Norton
Collaboration Contracts beta release

Today, I’m excited to announce the beta launch of Collaboration Contracts, a lightweight app designed to help teams—especially distributed ones—quickly define and manage their roles in decisions. Whether you're using it to bring clarity to one-off decisions or baking it into how your team operates every day, the app is built to support alignment, accountability, and smoother collaboration.

Collaboration Contracts beta release
Doc Norton
An Experiment Canvas

The Experiment Canvas is a simple means of planning, tracking, and responding to your experiments.

An Experiment Canvas
Doc Norton
Create simple things in small steps

Simple Things

When I say simple, I don’t necessarily mean easy. And I certainly do not mean crude in form or incomplete. Simple indicates something that does not have superfluous parts or multiple responsibilities, is easy to understand, is as independent from the rest of the solution as possible, and meets a need as is.

Simple may not address all use cases, but it does address some use cases.

Create simple things in small steps
Doc Norton
The Behaviors

Over the past several years, as I’ve been helping teams and organizations improve their ability to deliver software products that are desirable, viable, and feasible, I have been experimenting with a Behavior Framework that has proven to be rather effective. And I’d like to share it with you in hopes that you find it useful and that you provide me feedback on your experiences with it.

Announcement
Doc Norton
Beginning a New Book

My plan is to write a series of blog posts all related to the behaviors framework. Some of them will be about a specific behavior. Some of them will be about tools or techniques that help teams express one or more of the behaviors. Some of them will be my own experiences. And some will be damn near complete fiction.

Know the problem you are solving

Fixing Full-Stack Teams; Specialization Required

Fixing Full-Stack Teams; Specialization Required

Full-stack teams are a brilliant concept. They’re designed to have everything a team needs to solve problems in a given domain—front-end, back-end, database, security, you name it. When done right, these teams are little microcosms of outcome achievement, creativity, and autonomy. They blur skill boundaries, enabling faster delivery and real-time learning across disciplines. Sounds great, right?

But there’s a catch. Somewhere along the way, we started confusing “full-stack teams” with “teams of full-stack engineers.” When I say we, I mean it. I did this too. I was on the full-stack teams of full-stack engineers bandwagon. But that shift—over time—has cost us. By prioritizing generalists at the expense of specialists, we’ve inadvertently traded depth for breadth and innovation for adequacy. Let me explain.

Opportunity Solution Trees

Opportunity Solution Trees

In this article, I want to go more in depth on Opportunity Solution Trees; what they are, how they are used, how to create one, and how I think about them slightly differently (but only slightly) than folks like Teresa Torres who really introduced them broadly to the Product community in her book “Continuous Discovery Habits”. This book, by the way, is a must have for anyone who works in software product development - not just folks in product-specific roles.

The Behaviors

Over the past several years, as I’ve been helping teams and organizations improve their ability to deliver software products that are desirable, viable, and feasible, I have been experimenting with a Behavior Framework that has proven to be rather effective. And I’d like to share it with you in hopes that you find it useful and that you provide me feedback on your experiences with it.

Beginning a New Book

My plan is to write a series of blog posts all related to the behaviors framework. Some of them will be about a specific behavior. Some of them will be about tools or techniques that help teams express one or more of the behaviors. Some of them will be my own experiences. And some will be damn near complete fiction.