Skip to content

Delivery

Delivery is the engine of engineering. It's not just about shipping code—it's about shipping the right things, at a sustainable pace, with the quality your users deserve. Good delivery is predictable without being rigid, fast without being reckless, and quality-focused without being perfectionist.

This section provides the operating system for delivery: how to plan and slice work, maintain quality through CI/CD, respond to incidents, manage technical debt, partner with product, and continuously improve.

Why This Section Exists

Most delivery problems are not about individual capability. They are about systems: unclear planning, inconsistent quality gates, chaotic incident response, accumulating debt, misaligned priorities with product, and processes that don't learn from experience.

When these systems break, you see the symptoms: missed deadlines, unexpected bugs, exhausted engineers, frustrated stakeholders, and teams that feel like they're always firefighting. The fix is not working harder—it's building better systems.

This section provides those systems. Each page covers a specific aspect of delivery with concrete processes, clear ownership, and copy-pastable artifacts you can adapt for your team.

What Good Delivery Looks Like

When delivery is working well, you observe these patterns:

Predictability. Stakeholders know roughly when things will ship. Surprises are rare. When plans change, people know early.

Sustainable pace. The team ships consistently without heroics. Crunch is the exception, not the norm. People take vacations without deliveries falling apart.

Quality built in. Bugs are caught before they reach users. When they don't, the team learns and prevents recurrence. Technical debt is managed, not ignored.

Fast feedback loops. Code goes from merge to production quickly. Users see improvements frequently. The team learns from what ships.

Alignment with outcomes. The team understands why they're building what they're building. Engineering and product are partners, not adversaries.

What This Section Covers

Page Focus
Planning and Slicing How to break work into shippable increments with clear outcomes
Quality and CI Testing strategies, CI/CD pipelines, feature flags, and release hygiene
Incident Response On-call, runbooks, communication, and learning from incidents
Technical Debt Taxonomy, prioritization, and scheduling debt work
Product Partnership How engineering and product collaborate on outcomes
Continuous Improvement Retros, experiments, and the improvement cycle
Metrics in Execution Connecting delivery work to measurable signals

Common Failure Modes

Before diving into the specifics, it helps to name the patterns that break delivery:

The planning void. Work starts without clear scope, definition of done, or slicing. Everything takes longer than expected. Scope creeps. Stakeholders are surprised.

The quality afterthought. Testing is manual and inconsistent. CI is slow or flaky. Bugs escape to production regularly. The team spends more time fixing than building.

The incident chaos. When things break, nobody knows who's in charge. Communication is inconsistent. The same problems recur because nobody captures the learning.

The debt avalanche. Technical debt accumulates until it slows everything down. Refactoring becomes a political fight for time. Eventually, the team can't move without tripping over past decisions.

The feature factory. Engineering builds what product asks without questioning value. Outcomes aren't measured. The team ships features but doesn't know if they work.

The improvement theater. Retros happen but nothing changes. Action items pile up. The team keeps making the same mistakes.

This section provides playbooks to prevent each of these failures.

How to Use This Section

Start with Planning and Slicing if your team struggles with predictability or scope management. Good planning is the foundation of good delivery.

Read Quality and CI if bugs escape too often or your CI pipeline is slow/flaky. Quality is a system, not a phase.

If incidents feel chaotic, start with Incident Response. This page focuses on the delivery perspective; see also Crisis Management for the full framework.

Technical Debt helps you make debt visible and manageable instead of a constant source of friction.

Product Partnership covers the engineering side of working with product. For the fuller collaboration view, see Working with Product.

Continuous Improvement ensures your delivery system gets better over time.

Metrics in Execution connects the work to measurable outcomes.