Adam Zimman
Leadership, Platform, and GTM Advisor, Vertex Ventures
Adam Zimman is a start-up advisor providing guidance on leadership, product roadmap, and GTM strategy. Adam has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and...
Skills
Product Discovery
Frameworks for product discovery in developer tools: design partners, user research, personas, competitive analysis, and building for developer flow. Covers customer interview techniques, discovery processes, evaluating feature requests, and knowing when to pivot.
- +19
Agentic Engineering
How teams build software when AI coding agents write the code: directing agents, what code review and validation become when code is nearly free, durable systems with disposable code, orchestrating many agents, keeping them safe inside an organization, and how roles change.
- +15
Developer Trust
How to build and maintain developer trust through transparency, authentic community engagement, and careful communication: especially during transitions like acquisitions, enterprise expansion, or open source governance changes.
- +3
Tech Ethics & Responsible Engineering
Building with eyes open to unintended consequences. Covers the gap between engineering intent and real-world outcomes, responsible AI considerations, inclusive design, and the organizational practices that help teams anticipate harm before shipping.
- +8
Observability & Incident Response
The practice of operational reliability: instrumentation, monitoring, SLO setup, incident response, on-call design, and day-to-day reliability operations. Covers alerting strategies, error budgets, incident management processes, and blameless postmortems.
- +18
Resilience Engineering
The organizational side of reliability: learning from incidents, sociotechnical analysis, chaos engineering philosophy, and the limits of purely technical approaches. Covers incident analysis methods, safety culture, adaptive capacity, and building organizations that learn from failure.
- +17
Content from the Library
Third Loop Ep. #14, Brains in Jars with Dr. Cat Hicks
On episode 14 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team sits down with Dr. Cat Hicks, psychologist and author of The Psychology of Software Teams. Cat unpacks the “Brains in Jars” mental model, the belief that engineers are interchangeable pure-cognition units, and explains why organizations that hold it struggle to use AI well. The conversation covers learning debt, overproduction pressure, and what teams should do with the time agents save.
Third Loop Ep. #13, Ten Times Faster at What? with Jennifer Riggins
On episode 13 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team speaks with Jennifer Riggins about why faster code doesn’t automatically mean better software. They explore how AI exposes organizational bottlenecks, why psychological safety matters, and what Spotify’s growing feature set reveals about user value. Jennifer makes the case for smaller experiments, stronger feedback loops, and keeping people at the center of delivery.
Third Loop Ep. #12, Shipping at the Speed of Understanding with Steph Hippo
On episode 12 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team speaks with Steph Hippo, Platform Engineering Director at Honeycomb, about what happens when AI accelerates development beyond the pace humans can absorb. They explore safe defaults, evolving code reviews, and the feedback loops that help teams understand what they ship. Steph makes the case for reinvesting saved time in better decisions, software quality, and human connection.
