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I’m convinced it’s driven by business communication and objectives more than skill set. I’ve _never_ worked with a “product manager” or “product owner” that co
by mr_tristan 7y ago
I’m convinced it’s driven by business communication and objectives more than skill set.
I’ve _never_ worked with a “product manager” or “product owner” that could effectively tell me what a SLO was, or simply tell me what the business impact of bugs were. All I usually get is what we’ll lose if we don’t implement feature X or Y.
This impacts “DevOps” because it almost always puts focus and priority on anything feature-related. In order to do anything not feature-oriented, you literally have to be fighting massive quality problems on a daily basis. Thus... very few organizations understand how to have “devs and ops spend quality time together”. Almost all time not building features is wasted in their eyes.
In the end, this is why there’s a “dev and ops split”. The devs drive features, which PMs understand, and the ops makes things run, and the PO/PM types ignore them but sometimes like to make requests.
I think a pre-cursor to any real DevOps culture are SLOs that are understood and reported to executives. If that doesn’t exist, DevOps usually ends up being a BS term used to “remain relevant”. Without some kind of business quality objective, real DevOps time is pure cost, and counter to business development.
Just like “agile” BS, any real change usually starts at the top fo the company.
- Guthur 7y agoI'm not convinced that it's only POs that struggle with quantifying the cost of a bug in production. I can see the same when programming language advocates extol the benefits of more static analysis for software that does not even remotely need the level of reliability they are aiming for. The guy who hacks it together in PHP will just get to market first and get such a critical mass of market share that 5-10% more reliability probably won't matter. Of course a lot of this depends on market sector, self driving cars are a million miles from serving banner ads.
- mr_tristan 7y agoTrue, many POs/PMs drive a lot of prioritization of work, since (maybe unfortunately), they're usually the ones left to "understanding the business impact". It kind of adds more credence to people not being so siloed in responsibility. We all just bring different skills to the party. Thus, we're all responsible for quality, for business impact and prioritization, etc. Unfortunately, I've often had situations where, upon a reorganization, I'm left with managers who love to "guard others from distractions" and end up cutting team members off from broader discussions. Thus, leading to the siloing. This is why I think "DevOps" ends up meaning nothing. It's a _lot_ of details that requires lots of communication and knowledge sharing that can be overwhelming to, ahem, certain PHB types. Sometimes you can implement a tool, other times you can just not build a particular feature, but the reasons are usually very complex and never easily get broken into a simple one-liner task definition with a story point cost.
- pjmlp 7y agoThe best way to have PO that understand the business value of bugs is to work in traditional industries, where software just has a support role. Every bug or downtime that gets reported does have a visible business impact. And unnecessary features seldom get implemented if not covered by project budget.
- rcarmo 7y agoWhenever I go in to a new client and ask about what their SLIs are, I usually get blank stares from 90% of the audience and maybe _one_ timid reply.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]