ZeroBlockers vs Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Your team chose to learn. Its budget still names the feature.

What it is

A rich toolkit of options for how teams work

DAD is the delivery part of the wider Disciplined Agile toolkit. It offers teams a choice of delivery lifecycles, including exploratory ones, and of practices within them. Disciplined Agile adds Guided Continuous Improvement to help teams choose.

Where it breaks

Good choices made separately do not fit together

Each group picks its own options from the toolkit: the team a lifecycle, Finance a funding model, the PMO a way to track progress. Each choice can be valid on its own.

The toolkit does not say which choices must go together, so the organization has to do the fitting. A team told to explore can still be funded and tracked against a fixed list of features.

You will often see

Each group defends its own choice.
The team explores, and Finance tracks deliverables.
Conflicts go to a steering meeting.

How ZeroBlockers fixes it

One set of choices, made to fit together

Who carries the work from idea to satisfied customer

	Strategy and funding	Discover the problem	Test solutions	Build	Release	Run and measure
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)	Chosen by each group	Delivery team			The team, or separate release groups, depending on the options chosen	Measured in production only in the exploratory lifecycle
ZeroBlockers	Product Team	Stream Team

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Strategy and fundingChosen by each group
Discover the problem to BuildDelivery team
ReleaseThe team, or separate release groups, depending on the options chosen
Run and measureMeasured in production only in the exploratory lifecycle

ZeroBlockers

Strategy and fundingProduct Team
Discover the problem to Run and measureStream Team

ZeroBlockers makes those choices up front. One small team owns a part of the customer journey from research to live use. Its funding covers that part of the journey, and it decides how to solve the problem.

Leaders do less design work and get a ready answer on team structure, funding, and authority, at the cost of less room to fit each context.

The usual reply

“Disciplined Agile covers all of this, and fits it to your context.”

Disciplined Agile practitioners will say the toolkit already covers finance, portfolio management, and governance. They will add that a fixed model ignores real differences between parts of an organization.

The coverage is real, and fitting it to context is the toolkit’s strength. It is also the cost: someone has to do the fitting, and that work competes with everything else leaders are doing. ZeroBlockers trades some of that fit for a model that works on day one. If your Disciplined Agile adoption has already lined up funding and team authority, keep it.

01 / Side by side

How the approaches differ

ProcessHow work moves from idea to live use

Each team picks a lifecycle from a set of options, including an exploratory one for uncertain work.

Every team runs the same continuous loop: weekly research, build, release, and a check of the live result.

StructureWho is on the team

Offers options for roles and team structures, and the organization decides how they fit together.

A Stream Team owns one part of the customer journey and chooses its solutions, and the Product Team sets strategy and targets.

GovernanceHow success is judged and who decides

Offers options for governance and measures, chosen by each organization.

Outcome targets, each paired with a quality measure, are reviewed every week, and an agreed list says which decisions each team makes alone.

FundingWhether the scope gets locked

The wider toolkit covers finance, and each organization decides whether funding lets a team change its plan. Finance often keeps project funding against a list of deliverables.

Funds a part of the customer journey and reviews it quarterly, so the team can drop a feature without a new approval.

AlignmentHow many teams stay aligned

Each group chooses its own options, so good choices made separately may not fit together.

Six defined changes made in a set order, so funding, tracking, and team authority fit together.

ScalingSkills and the rest of the business

The wider Disciplined Agile toolkit has process blades for people management, finance, and other business functions.

Enabling Teams coach each discipline, and functional leads own careers. Internal Product Teams turn common requests into self-service.

02 / Why it differs

The differences explained

DAD gives options, and ZeroBlockers makes the choice

PMI describes DAD as a context-sensitive approach to the delivery lifecycle, with roles, practices, governance, and enterprise awareness. The wider Disciplined Agile toolkit also covers areas such as portfolio management and finance. Each area is a set of options, and each group chooses its own. But, crucially, it does not say which choices must go together, so each group tends to keep the option it already runs, and the organization has to do the fitting itself.

With a toolkit, every department designs its own piece. Finance picks a funding model, the PMO picks a way to track progress, and each team picks a lifecycle. Before anything can change, each of them has to work out how its choice fits with everyone else’s. Most never finish that work, so the old processes stay.

ZeroBlockers takes a much more opinionated stance with a set of six organizational changes: process, structure, governance, funding, alignment, and scaling. They are designed to work together. Funding follows a part of the customer journey, so the team that owns that part can change its solution. Governance reviews outcomes, so a change of solution needs no new approval. A Stream Team, a small, persistent team that owns one part of the customer journey, runs that part from research through live operation. The Product Team, the leadership group for the product, sets strategy, funding, and outcome targets.

An opinionated model gives less flexibility. It fixes ownership and decision rights, while teams still pick their own research techniques and engineering tools. In return, no department has to design its piece from scratch or negotiate how it connects to the others.

A team’s lifecycle choice does not change its budget

PMI’s lifecycle guidance includes exploratory and continuous delivery options and notes that they need organizational flexibility. It leaves the sponsor and Finance to provide that flexibility, and they make their own choices.

The result is a set of choices that do not fit. The team picks an exploratory lifecycle. Its sponsor funds a fixed list of deliverables. The PMO tracks the team against that list. The team is told to learn, then marked down when what it learns changes the plan.

ZeroBlockers funds the team’s customer scope, such as booking, and reviews that investment every quarter. The team can change its solution at any time between reviews. Leaders look at outcome evidence weekly and settle anything outside the team’s authority as it comes up.

Sources and comparison scope

Reviewed September 2026. This page compares ZeroBlockers with Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) as documented, with attributed practitioner accounts where available. Descriptions of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) follow its published guidance. Claims about common practice are attributed where they come from a named source. Other statements about what organizations typically do are our analysis. The worked example is our analysis and reports no measured results.