Reflections: Culture as a Competitive Wedge in DevOps, with Google & Autodesk

Armory’s Stephen Atwell sat down recently with Brandon Leach of Autodesk and Dave Stanke of Google for a roundtable interview. During their far-reaching discussion, they explore various ways in which company and team culture can make or break modern DevOps teams.  I listened to the conversation, and a handful of takeaways struck me as elegant in their simple, yet genuine power to contribute to a culture of success.

• Seek to learn, not blame: seemingly small details in team culture can actually ripple out to have massive impacts on technical teams;
• Automate, then let go: identify and eliminate slow, outmoded manual processes, both in the development and deployment phases in order to build and take advantage of new systems that automate and accelerate workflows;
• Cross-team collaboration: Generative culture can often be found in mutually inclusive teams who are invested in each others’ success, and who unlock value by breaking down barriers and tackling common challenges via mutually developed systems and processes;
• Be a booster, not a laggard: it might seem obvious, but you can easily improve team morale (and your reputation) by showing with your code and yourself early, consistently; and
• Keep a beginner’s mind: those who think they know less about a topic—but throw themselves at learning and especially doing something about it—often become perceived by their peers as experts… potentially even more so than those who call themselves experts.

I hope you find this talk to be as impactful I did, and welcome your questions or comments. See you at the next one!