DevOps is my culture, Agile is my Practice, Value is my Game

The statement "DevOps is my culture, Agile is my Practice, Value is my Game" encapsulates the core principles and values essential for success in modern organizations.

• DevOps signifies a cultural shift towards collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement, enabling teams to deliver high-quality software efficiently.

• Agile methodologies serve as the practical framework for implementing DevOps principles, emphasizing iterative development, adaptability, and customer-centricity.

• Finally, the pursuit of value underscores the ultimate goal of delivering meaningful outcomes to customers and stakeholders, driving organizational growth and success.

This abstract will delve into each component, providing insights and examples to elucidate their significance in today's dynamic business landscape.

1. DevOps is my Culture:

DevOps represents a cultural transformation within organizations, promoting collaboration and shared responsibility among development, operations, and other stakeholders.

Example: Teams adopting DevOps culture embrace practices listed below to improve software delivery processes.

• Cross Functional Collaboration: This is where both the developers and operations teams collaborate willingly to deliver value.

• Self Service: Each member of the team needs to embrace change at a behavioral level to initiate and achieve culture change.

“If you want to change the world, start with yourself.”

―Mohandas Gandhi

• Blameless Post mortems: This encourages teams to talk through what went wrong step by step and brainstorm ideas for improving. It also acknowledges that incident's are complicated and we are all humans which gives employees permission to embrace learning and change instead of defending their choices out of fear of consequences. To learn more

Case Study: "Two-Pizza Teams"

Amazon/AWS, strives to maintain the "Day 1 mentality" as their culture. "Day 1 Mentality" focuses on maintaining a fast- paced innovation while provide value. The company achieves this by hiring and maintaining an organization structure of empowered builders who are excited to wake up everyday to solve customer's thorniest problems and invent solutions on their behalf. You have heard the startup Joke, that a Startups strongest/ weakest Competitor is a product manager at a big corporation lets say XYZ , who heads the product line innovation in that industry line.

So How do we keep employees excited to solve costumer problems'?

Concept of "the two - Pizza Team" - No team should be big enough that it would take more than two pizzas to feed them.

Ideally, this is a team of less than 10 people. Smaller teams minimize lines of communication and decrease overhead of bureaucracy and decision making. This allows the "two -Pizza team" to spend more time focusing on their customers, constantly experimenting and innovating on their behalf. Additionally, the team is able to have a single threaded focus and deliver value to the product they are working on. The "Two-Pizza Teams" culture fosters autonomy and accountability, enabling small, cross-functional teams to innovate and deliver value independently. It also ensures that the team do not suffer from the Ringelmann effect (a tendency for individual productivity to decrease in large groups. As team resources swell, there is less focus on individual effort as people lean more on others to shoulder the load). Amazon has had tremendous innovation/ growth and increased value for the customer through this model.

Two-pizza teams have single-threaded ownership over a specific product or service. Rather than maintaining complex systems or solving problems spanning multiple services, lines of business, or customer segments, two-pizza teams are focused on just one service or offering, and just the customers who use it. This single-threaded focus promotes efficiency and scalability. Two-pizza teams’ roadmap – including the tradeoffs and prioritizations they need to make – are singularly focused on innovating on behalf of just their service and the customer segment that uses that service.

The two-pizza structure also promotes team accountability. Two-pizza teams do not hand over something they’ve launched to another team to run. This single-threaded ownership extends across the full customer experience and the entire lifecycle of a two-pizza team’s product or service.

As such, two-pizza teams need to stay on top of every part of their service, with a clear charter and a tightly defined mission. They need to remain close to their customers, and create the right tracking mechanisms, metrics, and KPIs to ensure their service is constantly delivering value to customers.

This also requires that a two-pizza team has the right resources embedded within them – engineering, testing, product and program management, operations, etc. – to help them own and run their service end-to-end.

As demands for a product or service grow, rather than expanding the team to many more members, Amazon looks for ways to split teams into separate two-pizza teams working on single-threaded sub-area of the service. This mitosis maintains a flatter organizational structure that preserves agility, autonomy, and single-threaded ownership.

In the end, a two-pizza team isn’t solely about size as much as it is about fostering and pushing ownership and independence down to the team level – from ideation to execution, from ongoing operational improvement to constant product iteration and innovation. It allows teams to run fast, experiment early and frequently, and apply learnings rapidly to constantly drive value to their customers. Faster innovation and experimentation also helps lower the costs of failure – your learnings come quicker and at lower stakes than you may have otherwise faced at later stages of development. More details on the concepts like Single-threaded leader, Cross functional team collaboration are explained in details here.

2. Agile is my Practice:

Agile methodologies provide the practical framework for implementing DevOps principles, enabling teams to respond quickly to changing requirements and deliver value iteratively.

Example: Scrum, a popular Agile framework, emphasizes time-boxed iterations called sprints, where teams deliver potentially shippable increments of product functionality.

Case Study: "Squad Model"

Spotify started out as a startup and has successfully kept an agile mindset despite having scaled to over 30 teams across 3 cities. Spotify implemented a "Squad Model" that focuses on team autonomy and relies on people to reach objectives and complete goals.

So how does the concept of "Squad Model" work?

Squad is like a mini-startup. It is the basic unit of the Spotify model. Squads are autonomous teams composed of 6 to 12 people working together on a specific feature area of the user experience. They are free to choose between any agile frameworks (Kanban, Sprints, MVP). Each of the cross-function is assigned the following people;

• A mission to guide their action and build their roadmap.

• A PO (Product Owner) who communicates the project vision to the team and assigns priorities. We can say the PO is like an entrepreneur that ensures his product works end-to-end.

• An agile Coach; He / She provides support and guidance to the team to help improve their workflows and explain agile principles.

Tribes is like an incubator for the Squads. It is made up of multiple squads working together on related missions and features (sample features include Music Player/ backend infrastructure). Tribes can comprise up to a maximum of 150 people and have a certain degree of autonomy but are placed under the authority of 1 or more tribe leads. Tribe leads are responsible for fostering teamwork and collaboration within the tribe and across the squads. Tribes work closely, often in the same office and hold regular meetings to exchange ideas and reviews their work.

Chapters is like a professor of the squads/ tribes. Chapters are horizontal structures designed to regroup the specialist of a specific tool/area within a tribe. They act as a backbone holding the squads together , they ensure best-practices are established and followed by everyone working on a specific feature across the entire tribe. Those standards make for faster development cycles and easier interoperability. Each chapter is headed by a chapter lead, who is usually a senior developer. He guides the other members of the chapter and helps them grow their skills to become even better specialist. Chapters are reserved for specialist only.

Guilds are like " a community of interest" they are transversal groups designed to facilitate exchange of solutions , knowledge sharing and to avoid time wastage (as a problem encountered by one tribe could have already been solved by another tribe) and their scope is large than chapters. They include members from different tribes who are distributed across the entire organization. Guild members convene during workshops/ hackathons and are open to anyone (this fosters self development and learning).

#chaptes and Guilds both function like communities designed to improve communications and topics of interest.

System wide Roles

• System Owners - they focus on things like quality, documentation , technical debt, stability, scalability of infrastructure and release process. Simply they build the road or highway for release

• Chief Architects- They co-ordinate work on a high-level architecture issues that cut across multiple systems.

Spotify's Agile adoption enables rapid feature development through its "Squad" model, where autonomous teams collaborate to deliver customer-centric solutions. Spotify is one of the best successful implementation of agile, scaled to the size of a large business. To read more on the "squad model" check out this articles. Article 1 and Article 2

3. Value is my Game:

The pursuit of value drives decision-making and prioritization, focusing on delivering meaningful outcomes to customers and stakeholders.

Example: Value stream mapping helps identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in software delivery pipelines, enabling teams to optimize processes and deliver value more effectively.

Case Study: "Personalized Recommendation & Seamless Streaming Experience"

Netflix's focus on personalized recommendations and seamless streaming experience demonstrates its commitment to delivering value to subscribers, driving customer satisfaction and retention.

Netflix's personalized streaming recommendation's allow them to cache content on servers near the customers edge location leading to optimized cache quality and improved content quality. Additionally, Netflix does internal pre-quality checks on the movies once received from the production houses to ensure they meet the Netflix standards before adding them to the catalogue. The continuous streaming challenge that Netflix faces is that their viewers want something interesting now or in real-time. the viewer reviews a couple of movies in the catalog before finalizing their choice. If the final choice is interesting they will watch to the end and if not they will drop off immediately. The competition for attention is high, Netflix is not only competing with other streaming services but also family time and the evolving social media apps that seem to take the world with a storm. Read their latest addition "Fast Laughs" that seems to copy the model of TikTok videos/ Instagram reels

For Netflix the Personalization's start at the Homepage. From the Horizontal arrangement of the streaming catalogues. one thing to note is that the personalization is done based on the whole household (meaning we have genres for everyone and for all at once) this concept also applies for a single person household and the importance here is to curate diversity of content and expound on the other interest the person might have. Some of the personalization categories:

• Top 10 row ranking to find best possible ordering of a set of items for a member, within a specific context in real-time.

• Genres - this Groups the content according to the themes of the movie i.e., action-themed movies, Romance

• Facebook Connect - this features allows you to connect your Netflix account with fakebook. Netflix provides Recommendations based on what your friends have watched. This embraces the concept of social support in that we are likely to do something if others have done it. This feature is only available in certain regions only.

• Similarity - this is based on a member's action such as searching / adding a title to the queue and watching a certain show. The actions contribute to the recommendation queue algorithms.

Netflix business objective is to maximize member satisfaction and month-to-month subscription retentions, which correlates well with maximizing consumption of video content. See the following links for more details article 1 , article 2 and article 3.

Conclusion

No part of the above concepts refers or even reflect anything like a set method or methodology, its all about a mindset, a way of thinking, a way of being and a way of doing. Not a formula or stepped process, but one of pragmatic and progressive Agility and Innovation based around Flow and Value for your business. That is why copy & paste won’t work for any business. Be sure to adapt and cherry-pick any good ideas shared here. Conway’s Law states that People and Organizations' Design Things Reflecting How they See, Communicate, and Operate. It's Crucial for a business to focus on the value stream and ensure any changes in their day process actually increase value. And value can be from increased productivity for employees to Increased customer retention. Learn more on this here

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