Bringing product thinking into DevOps

A key concern of delivery teams is turning ideas into features in the hands of users at pace. This means having the right tools and processes in form of a delivery pipeline in place. I believe it is now time to add Product Thinking into the mix, great our delivery pipelines as a product and elevate this traditionally technical concern to one of all stakeholders so that we can truly realise the benefits user centric delivery pipelines can provide.

With the advent of the DevOps movement we have seen an immense improvement in software delivery by closely linking software engineering with deployment and infrastructure and consequently improving our delivery pipelines, i.e. the tools and processes that enable us to turn ideas into features in the hands of users. We have also seen an increase in complexity of options: what is needed for one organisation is not what another organisation requires or can even stomach.

In fact, my experience from numerous DevOps transformation projects shows that we need to consider aspects of DevOps as strategic organisational assets, and in turn, must treat them as we would a product. By adding Product Thinking to DevOps we add the final missing piece to ensure that we meet not only technical needs but wider business expectations. In this talk I will demonstrate that there is value in shifting our perception of our delivery pipeline from technical capability to ‘product’, how this leads to not only better ways of working but also better overall outcomes, and how product management can easily be added to DevOps in practice.

Themes: Operability, Devops, Product Management, Product Thinking, CI/CD, Lean Agile, Inceptions, User centric design