Day 2: Assessing and Building a Strong DevOps Culture

Be Better Engineering Leader, a 30 Days Series

This is the first week of a series of daily lessons on how to Be a Better Engineering Leader. I recommend spending up to an hour on each lesson to gain insights into Product, Technology, and People—areas critical for every Engineering Manager.

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DevOps culture is more than just hiring DevOps engineers or creating a platform team. It’s a proven methodology that emphasizes collaboration, shared responsibility, and continuous improvement. It is built on decades of accumulated knowledge and best practices from successful organizations worldwide.

The DevOps approach enables teams to deliver high-quality software quickly and reliably, promoting a high-trust environment where feedback and learning are key drivers of success. Ultimately, it’s about building a resilient organization that can adapt and thrive in a constantly changing environment.

Core Principles of DevOps Culture

1. Streamlined Delivery: Deliver customer value quickly and frequently with minimal friction.

2. Frequent Feedback: Gather and act on feedback at every stage, from code to customer.

3. Continuous Experimentation and Learning: Use feedback to foster a culture of experimentation and innovation.

Action Points

Step 1: Evaluate Your DevOps Culture

On a scale of 1-10, rate how your team or organization aligns with the following aspects of DevOps culture. Use the DevOps Culture Checklist as a guide, which you can access here.

If you don't have access to the checklist template, use these guiding questions:

• High-Trust Culture: Is there a collaborative atmosphere where people are encouraged to take risks? Can team members talk about problems without fear of repercussions?

• Blameless Post-Mortems: Do you conduct post-mortems to learn and improve, not to assign blame?

• Collaborative Learning: Is there a hypothesis-driven culture that promotes experimentation and data-driven decisions?

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment: Is the deployment process quick, routine, and stress-free?

• Automated Testing: Do you have automated tests that run in production-like environments?

• Production Telemetry: Do you have systems to monitor code and production environments?

• Team Independence: Can teams work independently and deliver value quickly and frequently?

• Long-Term Teams: Are teams kept intact after each release to continue iterating and improving?

• Self-Service Platforms: Do teams have access to self-service platforms for deployment and other tasks?

• Predictable Deployments: Are deployments routine, occurring without disrupting business or customers?

• Dark Launch Techniques: Before public release, do you use dark launch techniques to test features with internal teams and small cohorts?

• Fault Injection and Chaos Engineering: Do you conduct planned exercises to test resilience in production environments?

• Risk Mitigation and Security: Are automated tests and peer reviews built into daily work?

• Everyone Owns Quality: Are engineers confident enough to push their changes straight to production?

• Productivity & Stress Levels: Does the organization achieve its goals with minimal rework and late-night firefighting?

• Customer Impact: Do customers notice new features and bug fixes that delight them?

• Outcome and Data-Driven: Are all things developed with clear measurement and success metrics?

Step 2: Identify Areas for Improvement

• Select one or two areas where your team scored the lowest. For example, if your team lacks a high-trust culture, work on creating a more open and supportive environment.

Step 3: Set Specific Goals

• Define clear, actionable goals for improvement in the selected areas. For instance, introduce blameless post-mortems or automate a part of your CI/CD pipeline that is currently manual.

Step 4: Take Immediate Action

• Schedule a team meeting to discuss your findings and improvement plan. Assign responsibilities and set deadlines for achieving these goals.

Resources for Further Learning

• Blog Post: DevOps Culture For Engineering Leaders

• Premium Content: DevOps Culture Checklist Template

• Recommended Reading: The DevOps Handbook

By regularly assessing and improving your DevOps culture, you can build a resilient and high-performing engineering organization. Take the first step today and use this checklist to evaluate where you stand.

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