When I say I’m joining Test Double as their new VP of Delivery, I’m not just making a career move—I’m making an alignment move. This is a company that already values the things I value. They’ve built a strong culture, a strong team, and a strong set of practices. I’m not joining to overhaul anything. I’m joining to help make something great even better.
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.
The Experiment Canvas is a simple means of planning, tracking, and responding to your experiments.
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.
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.
Validate before during and after
The problem with the term best practice is not always the practice itself—it’s the perspective the phrase invites. Best is steeped in finality. It implies that nothing better exists, or ever will. That the thinking is over. And while we may not mean it that way, language shapes thought. When we call something “best,” we stop asking “is it still working?”
The way your teams are structured shapes the software you build—and vice versa. In this article, we explore the profound connection between team and software composition through the lens of Conway’s Law, uncovering how misalignment leads to chaos and inefficiency, while thoughtful alignment drives collaboration, modularity, and adaptability. Learn why your true architecture isn’t in diagrams but in the code itself, and discover actionable steps to align your teams and software for better outcomes.
When teams hear about small, frequent deployments, they often picture chaos: code breaking, users complaining, and developers scrambling to fix issues. But in reality, small deployments do the opposite. They reduce complexity, amplify feedback, and create a smoother experience for both users and developers.
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.
If you are not familiar with Liberating Structures, I suggest you take a look at them. I use a few of them now and then as circumstances warrant. In future articles, I will discuss some of the others, but today’s installation is dedicated to the Liberating Structure I most often use — 1–2–4-All.
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.
