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.

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.

In this excerpt from Escape Velocity, we take a more in-depth look at Velocity and try to answer (at least in part) the question, “What Is Velocity”?