These are the four pillars that make the dimmer switch possible. You need to understand them so you know where to lean in, what to ask for, and how to provide the feedback that makes the whole system work.

On episode 11 of Third Loop, Chad Fowler explores regenerative software and what architecture looks like when AI makes code cheap enough to continually replace.

Progressive Delivery is not brand new. The pattern is older than software. What is new is that software teams need to find a way to do this while operating at faster and faster rates of production.

Progressive Delivery decouples deployment from release. In a traditional model, these happen at the exact same time. Bang. In Progressive Delivery, they are separated by hours, days, or weeks. This separation is where your power lives.

Enhance your security knowledge with FusionAuth's webinars. Access live and on-demand sessions on authentication and authorization best practices.

the Human Connection Moat For thirty years, the "build versus buy" debate was the persistent game of tetherball in the CTO’s office. It was a rational, if often heated, accounting exercise. On one side: the allure of ultimate control—software tailored perfectly to your unique business logic, free from the constraints of a vendor’s roadmap. On the other: the pragmatic realization that recreating wheels is a waste of talent.

We’ve all felt it. You wake up, open an app you use every day, and suddenly the "Buy" button is gone, replaced by a "Shopping Bag" icon buried in a sub-menu. Or perhaps the checkout flow you could navigate in your sleep now requires three extra clicks. In physics, the rate of change in acceleration is called Jerk.  In software development, Technological Jerk is that jarring, motion-sick feeling users experience when the product changes faster than their ability to adapt.

Recently, I was lucky enough to be invited to present at the DORA community coffee chat. The discussion is the really amazing part of these conversations, but it also encouraged me to create a short version of our talk! In other awesome news this week, Progressive Delivery (the book) won the DevOps Dozen community award! Amazing.

Recently, I was lucky enough to be invited to present at the DORA community coffee chat. The discussion is the really amazing part of these conversations, but it also encouraged me to create a short version of our talk! In other awesome news this week, Progressive Delivery (the book) won the DevOps Dozen community award! Amazing.

When we talk to teams about Progressive Delivery they are often most interested in learning how they can move faster without introducing technological jerk for their users. They want to innovate, but realize they also want to build the right thing for the right people at the right time.  We love this.  However it's also worth mentioning there is an upside down world to product delivery.

We’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the “tech jerk”—that sudden, often uncomfortable change in the acceleration of a product or service that disrupts the user’s experience. Borrowed from physics, where jerk describes a change in acceleration (think of a lurching elevator or a car braking too hard), the term perfectly captures how poorly managed technological change can leave users feeling disoriented, frustrated, or even abandoned.

One of the interesting problems of being immersed in something for years is that it feels really obvious to you. The curse of knowledge is real. So we were really excited to give a talk at IT Revolution's conference, the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit. It gave us a chance to lay out our vision of what Progressive Delivery is, and what it may be in the future.

One of the interesting problems of being immersed in something for years is that it feels really obvious to you. The curse of knowledge is real. So we were really excited to give a talk at IT Revolution's conference, the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit. It gave us a chance to lay out our vision of what Progressive Delivery is, and what it may be in the future.

When we're making software, it's easy to have our hearts and minds focused on The Next Thing, the new hardware that will support it, the rate of adoption. But it's worth remembering that you may have devoted customers who are not going to install your new things right away. They're worth listening to.

When we're making software, it's easy to have our hearts and minds focused on The Next Thing, the new hardware that will support it, the rate of adoption. But it's worth remembering that you may have devoted customers who are not going to install your new things right away. They're worth listening to.

We're deeply invested in the future of software development, specifically how we can deliver exceptional value to users while minimizing risk. That's why we're excited about Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda’s new book, Frictionless: How to Outpace Your Competition in the AI Era.

On the surface, letting people have all the customizations anyone has ever asked for seems like a great way to get alignment with what they want. They'll just use the things they need! And maybe they want something they haven't thought to ask for. But that's just the first thought, because the more options a piece of software has, the more work it takes to understand it, and the faster the users need to accept change. The interface gets cluttered. Then it gets horrendous. Then it looks like the administration view of Jira.

On the surface, letting people have all the customizations anyone has ever asked for seems like a great way to get alignment with what they want. They'll just use the things they need! And maybe they want something they haven't thought to ask for. But that's just the first thought, because the more options a piece of software has, the more work it takes to understand it, and the faster the users need to accept change. The interface gets cluttered. Then it gets horrendous. Then it looks like the administration view of Jira.

The following is a transcript from the video. The transcript has been edited for easier reading and organization. Mark (Host): Okay, well thank you everybody for coming today. This is going to be very exciting. Adam is here; he's going to be talking about progressive delivery. Adam's worked with a number of startups and also worked at GitHub, and he can tell you more of the things he's done.

Learn how feedback loops powered by observability and automation help developers and platform engineers ship features faster and with greater reliability.

It's beeeeeeeen ONE WEEK since our BOOK RELEASE. (Did I give you an earworm? Please join me in my suffering) We have been nominated as a finalist in the DevOps Dozen competition, along with a strong slate of other new books. We hope you'll vote here on the book that you've gotten the most value from or even the one you're most excited to read, and we…

Progressive Delivery is a book that released today, but it's us catching the wild yeasts of the last few years and cultivating them into wine and sourdough. We don't know exactly how it will turn out, but we truly believe that our principles are correct, and that this is the way that software is moving, and must continue to move. We are the ones who wrote it down, but you are the ones who will taste it, cultivate it, learn to see it in your world, and expand it in ways we never imagined.

Software users, especially in the enterprise, are a captive audience, until they aren't. How do we respect their experience and their capacity to consent?

Don't let anyone tell you creative collaboration requires co-presence. Last week was the first time in at least 7 years that all four Progressive Delivery authors were in the same place at the same time. In that time, we identified a pattern happening in the world, named it, honed our understanding, and wrote a whole book about it. The Progressive Delivery book releases in just under a month (

YouTube video by IT Revolution

The DORA 2025 report covers the second year of the AI revolution, and what it means for organizational transformation. This post is the Progressive Delivery take-aways.

In a pervasive software world, the problem for both companies and users is not a lack of data, it’s a lack of metadata handles that allow us to manipulate the data in a useful and usable way.

Advance copies of the Progressive Delivery book have arrived, and they smell like the start of school and learning cool new stuff.

Photo by Anthony DeRosa on Pexels.com A theme keeps coming up in our conversations with engineering leaders lately. They describe their process for deploying new LLMs and it sounds like how we used to treat monolith releases ten years ago, and it's terrifying. This invokes a feeling of moving at incredible speed but without the right guardrails. And so it was no surprise when OpenAI acquired Statsig–It wasn't just another acquisition, it was a profound signal.

For the first time since we started writing this book, all four authors will be in the same place at once! We're doing a talk and a book launch at Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit in Las Vegas in September. Get your tickets now for the conference Heidi has always referred to as "what happens when DevOps meets compliance and grows up".

We can’t automate what we don’t understand. Doing something manually is always an essential part of automating a process, and sometimes it’s hard for us to see all the parts and elements of a process that we want to automate. 

Progressive delivery tends to assume that you’re doing continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment. We have automated all the mechanical parts of being a release manager, leaving only the residual and not-at-all difficult emotional labor parts. 

Progressive delivery doesn't take the place of Agile, DevOps, or Continuous Delivery. Rather it builds on those. It's a holistic approach that asks you to continue breaking down silos, and incorporating those lessons with this new point of view. 

A hermit crab is the perfect mascot for Progressive Delivery, because change is inevitable.