Doc Norton
Speed Is a Side Effect

When leaders ask teams to "go faster," they're usually not asking for better outcomes. They're asking for more output. More stories delivered. More code shipped. More visible progress.

Implicit in that ask is a pretty big assumption: that we already know exactly what needs to be built, that the plan is correct, and that execution is the only thing standing between us and success.

So "go faster" becomes shorthand for "execute the plan harder."

That's where things start to go wrong.

Speed Is a Side Effect
Doc Norton
Don't fail fast; Observe often

The problem with "fail fast" is that it too often becomes "move fast." Failure is hidden or spun as success, speed is rewarded, and the learning part gets lost entirely. At its worst, "fail fast" is an excuse to rush into the next thing without pausing to understand what just happened.

What I want to promote instead is Observe Often. The shift in language is intentional—when we say “observe,” we bring focus back to what matters: seeing, measuring, and learning from what we do. And “often” reinforces frequency over haste. It’s not about reckless speed; it’s about small, deliberate moves and frequent feedback loops.

Don't fail fast; Observe often
Doc Norton
Why I Joined Test Double

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.

Why I Joined Test Double
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

Excellent Developers Are the Best Hires

I recently read a post wherein the author was condoning the hire of excellent programmers with abrasive personalities over bad programmers with cordial personalities. Superficially, I agree with this advice as it is ultimately better to have an individual who does their job well and delivers over an individual who you get along with very well, but who cannot produce.

A false dichotomy

The notion that you must choose between great developers with bad personalities or bad developers with great personalities is just plain false. The dynamics involved are far more complex than that, but let's assume for a brief moment, that there are only two criteria any company hires on; raw skill and congeniality.

Roshambo Estimating

This is a quick post. I just want to share a technique we've been using for initial story estimating. I first used this technique at ThoughtWorks when we were working on a project that required a lot of estimating. I think it came about because 1) we did not have any estimating cards immediately available and 2) that is the kind of place ThoughtWorks is. I later came to discover that the technique is not only fun, but it actually has a few additional benefits.

Take Control of your Development Career

I got the opportunity to do a little road-trip with my daughter this past weekend. I had an opportunity to speak at the Carolina Code Camp. They accepted all three of my submissions, so I figured I should make the trip. She spent a couple of semesters at High Point University in North Carolina and was looking forward to seeing some friends, so she offered to come along.

The trip was great. We had a total of fourteen hours together in the car, which gave us plenty of time to catch up, talk philosophy, talk a little politics, and just hang out. If you think fourteen hours is a lot of time to fill talking, you haven't met my daughter or me. Separated, we are fairly loquacious, but together, we can get into a zone and move from subject to subject with nary a pause.
 

The Technical Debt Trap

I had the honor of presenting at Chicago Code Camp this week on the topic of technical debt. For those of you who know me, you know this is a topic I feel passionately about. More accurately, I am concerned about the misunderstandings surrounding technical debt and the frequent use of the term to placate any sense of responsibility over writing messy code in pursuit of a deadline.

Optimal pairing

A while back, I posted a rambling entry about the impact of Harmonic Mean on a team's performance. The post was actually about pairing. My intention was to put a solid mathematical, albeit only pseudo-scientific, explanation behind my paring recommendation, but I think I lost several people (including myself once or twice) in the math and all the fancy words.

In short, whenever you pair two people of disparate skill sets, their contribution to production is more heavily influenced by the lesser skilled or experienced of the two. And the impact is significant. The greater the disparity in skill/experience, the more significant the impact.

Stories are about why; not what or how

I've been on numerous Agile projects with varying methods for capturing stories. Quite popular (and purportedly the ThoughtWorks standard) is the "As a, I want, So that" story format.

While I have seen teams do well with this format, I think it can be radically improved with a minor change. I prefer to see "So that, as a, I want" story format.

My reasoning is quite simple; the emphasis is incorrect in the common story format.

Harmonic Mean is a Bitch

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Metaphorically, this applies to teams. But in actuality, this is simply not the case. Humans have not only tenacity, but the ability to countervail one another. This is a quality that inanimate objects simply do not possess. We can and will compensate for one another for the good of the team. Links in a chain are incapable of sharing their strength. No other link can compensate for the weakest.

What if no one reads it?

Among the books I am currently making my way through is "Exploring Computer Science with Scheme" by Oliver Grillmeyer. The publish date on this particular book is 1998. No matter how often it happens, I feel a twinge of despair for our profession when I read sound advice from a decade or more ago that has yet to be widely adopted; or worse is still hotly contested.

Grillmeyer contrasts a couple different functions that accomplish the same end. One terse, but obfuscated; One verbose, but transparent. In conclusion, Grillmeyer states, "In a tradeoff between readability and length of code, you should favor readability."