In Scrum, "on track" means "we completed our sprint commitment." That tells you nothing about business impact. In FLOQ, "on track" means "our shipped features are moving metrics toward targets." The Floq Rate and Outcome Board give you real-time visibility into actual progress — not just task completion. If metrics aren't moving, you know immediately, not at the end of a 2-week sprint.

Currents provide directional roadmapping. You define Currents (big objectives) for the quarter, each containing Outcome Tickets. Stakeholders see the Currents and their progress. The difference: you're committing to outcomes ("improve checkout conversion"), not to features ("build one-click checkout"). Outcome-level commitments survive changing requirements. Feature-level commitments don't.

Three mechanisms replace the sprint demo: (1) Ship & Show — brief async update every time something ships. (2) Current Map — always-current visual of all Currents and their Floq Rate. (3) Drop Notes — external-facing summary of what shipped this period. Stakeholders get more frequent, more meaningful updates than a bi-weekly sprint review.

FLOQ has structure — it just doesn't pretend arbitrary 2-week time-boxes are meaningful structure. The Outcome Board, Impact Scores, and explicit stages provide clear "what am I working on and why" context. Builders know their current Outcome Ticket, their AI Pair, and the metric they're targeting. That's more clarity than most sprint backlogs provide.

Infrastructure work becomes Outcome Tickets too — but the outcome is technical: "Reduce API p99 latency from 800ms to 200ms." On-call and maintenance work is tracked as Drag — anything slowing Floq Rate is explicitly managed and addressed continuously, not buried in a sprint backlog as perpetual tech debt.

The Builder. AI generates; humans review and are accountable. The Ship Standard enforces automated quality gates before anything reaches production. AI is a Builder, not an autonomous agent — it works under human oversight. The accountability model doesn't change; the labor split does.

The Ship Standard is configurable. For regulated industries, add compliance checks to the automated pipeline: audit trails, data classification gates, compliance scan results. Continuous deployment doesn't mean "skip compliance" — it means compliance is automated and continuous rather than a manual gate at sprint end. Automated compliance is faster AND more thorough than manual sprint-end reviews.

New Builders are paired with an AI Pair immediately. They start with low Impact Score Outcome Tickets. The Outcome Board and Current Map give full context without requiring attendance at a sprint planning ceremony. Async Pulses and Ship & Shows create a searchable history of what was built and why — better onboarding documentation than sprint notes.

FLOQ has explicit planning — it's called SHAPE. Every Outcome Ticket requires a Launchpad session defining the approach, impact score, and signal threshold. Skipping SHAPE creates unmeasurable outcomes, which violates the core principle. The Floq Lead's job is to enforce this. FLOQ without SHAPE is just "move fast and break things" — explicitly not what FLOQ prescribes.

FLOQ is new. It's built on patterns proven by teams at the fastest-moving companies — continuous deployment (Netflix, Amazon), async-first communication (GitLab, Basecamp), outcome measurement (growth teams everywhere), and AI pair programming (emerging standard). FLOQ synthesizes these into a coherent methodology. Early adopters are building the case studies. Are you one of them?

Agile has been "fixed" for 23 years. SAFe, LeSS, Spotify Model, Scrum@Scale — all attempts to fix Agile at scale. The overhead hasn't reduced; it's grown. When the fundamental unit (the sprint) is no longer valid in an AI world, iteration isn't enough. FLOQ is a clean-slate rethink, not a patch.