[May 2026] This argument still holds. Both “ship quickly and often” and “defer commitment” remain true today; cost-of-delay weighting (Reinertsen, Fox & Gregory) and real-options framing are the sharper economic vocabulary that grounds them.
[August 2026] “They build slowly and test often” is the practitioner’s version of an argument I make more formally in Chapter 7 of Come Prepared to Die: a plan held as a commitment kills the learning, and a plan held as a hypothesis invites it. The marshmallow is what a premature commitment feels like when it lands.
Many of you will be familiar with Peter Skillman’s Marshmallow Challenge, an exercise frequently given to teams and business school students. Teams of four are given 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, one yard of twine, and a marshmallow. They are then given 18 minutes to build a free-standing structure that places the marshmallow as high off of the table as possible. The team with the highest marshmallow wins.
If you haven’t seen it already, Tom Wujec’s TED talk is a good place to learn about the challenge. And if you haven’t introduced your team(s) to it, take 45 minutes out of one of your days to administer the challenge and see what revelations you get.
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