I mentioned to Toby that he could be really influential with his experience in the CI/CD space. He wasn’t so sure. He’s on the UX (user experience) side of the fence. He didn’t think he had the credibility or sway with the eningeering community to lead behavior and outcome change.
I was about to kick off an initiative to focus on Delivery and Operational Excellence. It was going to focus on the “Accelerate” metrics (MTTR, Change Frequency, Lead time for Change and Change Failure Rate). There were other leading indicators we’d look at, too. Daily commits per developer, Mean time to fix the build (MTTFTB?), code coverage and trending plus a survey of the product team community about build, deploy and work management & culture (agile-things).
I needed a technical leader to help build to demonstrate the metrics. I needed to prove “Working Software Wins.”
I realized, this was the perfect opportunity. I have a full stack engineer on the UX Team. DevOps is a UX issue. The reason to obsess about anything DevOps is UX. DevOps is about creating outcomes for the product enduser by improving the life and outputs of the engineers.
DevOps is the Southwest Airlines Mission Statement. Southwest’s Mission is:
The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit. We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth.
https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/index.html
To over simplify:
- Serve the Customer.
- Take care of Employees.
If you take care of number 2. Number 1 often takes care of itself.
We will move DevOps from and Engineering concern obsessed with Implementation Details and the coolest shiny thing to a User Experience and Product Management concern focused on maximizing speed to value and creating strong and continuously improving user experiences.
Every line of code written should solve a business problem (i.e.- make money or save money). Every change in tooling should do the same.
The first problem to solve? How do we produce software people love using. If DevOps doesn’t solve this problem. DevOps isn’t a solution. DevOps is a User Experience optimizer. It is not a technical solution. Technical solutions only enable the outcome. A happy user.
