Cloud
Data & AI
Every company that seeks to stay relevant in today’s digitalized world needs its software to be market-ready and deliver a great experience—no matter who the end-user is. Software has become an integral part of a company’s ecosystem. It powers almost every aspect of your operations and the customer experience.
The way people live and consume has drastically changed in the past year. New consumer markets are highly dependent on technology, demanding faster and reliable products at all times. To keep up with constantly evolving demands, businesses need to adapt how they interact and reach out to their customers. This means you need to be agile, something a DevOps culture enables. The DevOps framework is vital for companies to improve product readiness and customer satisfaction, but reaching this goal requires the right team as well.
A well-established DevOps culture and a stellar team of engineers can help you achieve your goals.
A DevOps Culture Prioritizing Product Readiness and Customer Satisfaction Requires Strategic Goals
If your organization wants to focus on product readiness and customer satisfaction, you’ll need to set clear objectives. The DevOps framework can deliver value to customers faster than ever with shorter release cycles, continuous testing, and feedback. However, building an efficient DevOps pipeline capable of delivering on those goals starts with the right team. Without the right players, you won’t gain ground on these two critical areas of product development.
Reliability supports product readiness and customer satisfaction, which is a critical pillar of the DevOps philosophy. Shifting left, releasing, and testing smaller code fragments helps increase a product’s reliability, making it “ready for market,” therefore driving higher customer satisfaction. A DevOps approach gives you the framework, but it requires expertise to make it happen.
Building Your Team is Just as Important as Building Your Software
Channel the same determination and passion into building your DevOps/SRE team as you do for developing the product itself. The DevOps philosophy is fundamentally about the people and how they work together. Products, of course, are the result of their collaboration. While advanced tooling and technical skills such as automation, monitoring, and security are essential, the human factor inarguably makes the difference between a successful DevOps organization and one that struggles to implement the discipline.
Before DevOps practices entered the mainstream, development, and operations sat in silos. Collaboration and communication were at a minimum. The constant friction between the two teams hurt software development, and the traditional waterfall model didn’t allow teams to incorporate testing and feedback earlier in the development lifecycle. Thus, the delivery of the product was slow and costly.
DevOps cultures changed the game. It’s been a positive disruption, with enterprises across almost all sectors around the globe embracing DevOps. Organizations realized the critical value of DevOps roles, including Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), in releasing timely software products and services that incorporate customer feedback. These individuals bring a wealth of skills and knowledge to the table.
What Skills Matter the Most?
If your company targets product readiness and customer satisfaction, there are specific skills you’ll want to consider. You’ll want to seek out a mix of qualities, including both hard and soft skills.
For technical DevOps skills, your “must-haves” should include:
- Knowledge of cloud platforms
- Modern computing technologies and architectures (such as microservices, serverless, containers)
- Expertise with DevOps tools
- Software security experience
- Application technologies
- Command of automation technology
- Coding and scripting acumen
- Testing capabilities
- IT operations and infrastructure
Still, the DevOps methodology is constantly expanding as new tools and technologies emerge. Knowledge of specific tooling is less important than hiring an engineer with the right DevOps mindset and hands-on experience creating solutions.
Today’s DevOps professionals are empowered, well-rounded, and agile engineers. They should be good communicators—beyond tech speak. They should also be proactive and curious. These qualities ensure that when missteps happen, your team sees them as opportunities, not setbacks.
How DevOps Professionals and SREs Contribute to End-User Satisfaction
Considering what DevOps professionals do, it’s easy to see why they are so integral to end-user satisfaction. With this team, you can meet deployment dates and deliver a better experience. DevOps and SRE roles are instrumental in helping companies meet modern consumers’ expectations and keep customers coming back.
Closing the Loop, Pushing Faster Fixes
Frequent feedback loops deliver information faster, so developers can fix bugs with greater speed while continuing to deploy a reliable product. Organizations that have successfully adopted a DevOps approach fail sixty times less often and recover much faster than those that haven’t.
Quicker Product Delivery
A DevOps framework delivers products faster by leveraging automation as well as agile methods and eliminating repetitive tasks. When DevOps teams can release new features or even new products within days compared to years, organizations unlock new ways to accelerate innovation.
Agility matters
Consider how easily end users’ needs and customer loyalty can change across a variety of industries. Software platforms fuel these changes, and you can’t stay competitive if you’re always late to the party.
Lower Development Costs
The DevOps lifecycle is much shorter across the entire process. Plus, with the introduction of DevSecOps, security is now an integral part of DevOps, further improving software reliability and lowering overall development costs. Lower production costs provide organizations the opportunity to offer lower prices to their users.
Seeing Both Sides
DevOps professionals are in a unique seat. They see both sides of the product. They understand the engineering and technical aspects of how a product should work while also grasping the operational components and the business benefits.
Because of this perspective, DevOps engineers can advocate for end-users as well. Their primary goal is to provide the best experience for customers, and in this pursuit, DevOps professionals’ communication skills are crucial.
Reach Your DevOps Goals with the Best Talent
A DevOps culture is customer-centric, and reliable products and services are what both you and your customers want. But delivering better quality products and reliable services at all times requires the right talent. When DevOps experts lead your team, improving product readiness and increasing customer satisfaction is easier than with a traditional development process.
