Vertical Velocity
How to Break Silos, Ship Faster, and Reclaim Engineering Joy
I was sitting in a war room at 2 AM, watching a backend team blame the frontend team, who blamed the DBA, who blamed the security team. A critical checkout flow had been down for six hours. Every team had dashboards showing they were “green.” Every engineer was working flat-out. Nobody was wrong. But the customer was still broken.
That night, I stopped asking “who is at fault” and started asking “how is the system designed?”
That question runs through every chapter. Vertical Velocity is the playbook that answers it: the numbers that win over leadership, the conversations that bring managers along, the contracts and tests that let each team ship on its own, and the metrics that prove it's working.
Not out yet. The workshop cards are here today.
Practitioners already feeling the pain
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Engineering leaders
VPs, directors and CTOs who need to scale their organizations without losing the ability to ship software.
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Engineering managers and tech leads
On the ground, resolving cross-team friction, and feeling like they're herding cats.
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Product managers
Who don't understand why a simple feature request takes three months to reach production, and want to be part of the solution.
Not for beginners: it assumes you know what a microservice is and what CI/CD means.
A playbook, not a theory
Part 1 · The problem
The invisible wall: why siloed teams fail. The economics of flow: Cost of Delay and Kingman's formula, the financial case for change.
Part 2 · The solution
The anatomy of a feature team, the blueprint for the transition, the day-to-day engine inside the pod, and the contract security shield: Pact, Spectral and a Definition of Done.
Part 3 · The enablers
Architecture as an enabler with the Inverse Conway Maneuver, and mitigating cognitive load with a thinnest viable platform.
Part 4 · Measurement and scale
Measuring what matters with DORA and Westrum, two turnarounds told in full, and how to sustain the change.
Bonus · AI as a cognitive co-pilot
A prompt library for contract tests and API specs, and the checklist to run before trusting what it writes.
Every chapter ends with tools you can use the next day: a value stream mapping workshop script, conversation scripts for resistant managers, copy-pasteable contract tests and linting rules, a DORA calculator, and a feature team maturity self-assessment. The code is tested and runnable in the companion repository.
Try the cards with your team
Start with the DORA calculator or the Westrum culture check: free, and no sign-up.
Start a team