How DevOps and Delivery Leads Work Together

Partnership that separates teams who ship on time from teams who don't

Here’s a question that’s been bouncing around my head for some time:

Why do some teams ship ON TIME constantly, while others with similar talent and budgets struggle to get anything out the door?

I've been obsessed with this question because I recently witnessed two Agile teams in the same company: one that ships every week, and the other that is always "almost done."

Why?

The obvious answers don't hold up.

I’ve spent the last few months exploring this. I talked to the delivery leads at some of the most renowned companies in the world.

Here’s what I found.

Shipping (in most cases) is NOT an engineering problem.

It’s not.

The problem is “coordination” across various team functions. One such coordination problem exists between two roles that almost nobody thinks about: DevOps and Delivery Leads.

Today, I’m going to break down exactly how this relationship works, why most teams get it wrong, and what you can do to fix it.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The job of an Agile Delivery Lead

• The job of DevOps

• The coordination gap

• Mental models for better collaboration

• The framework that successful teams use to diagnose the problem

• What they do when production breaks

• The metrics they use

• An action plan that you can use for your team

Let’s get into it.

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