Delivery Systems Over Checklists
February 21, 2026
- delivery
- leadership
- systems
Most teams do not have a speed problem. They have a system problem.
The trap
Checklists are useful for repetition, but weak for coordination. As scope grows, task lists become stale faster than teams can update them.
What scales
- A weekly planning cadence with clear owners.
- Explicit “definition of done” per team.
- Post-release review with one concrete improvement.
A delivery system should reduce ambiguity every week. If it does not, it is just process theater.