After retiring from running DevOpsDays five years earlier, I joined a startup to help with scalability issues. Even though I thought I had DevOps figured out, it took a full year to convince a small team they needed testing. We went from git checkout on production servers to deploying in real time during live television shows. Once the pipeline was solid and collaboration was flowing, I started looking for the next bottleneck in the company.
What I found was that as a small company, we wanted to focus on our core domain – live shows and interactivity – rather than building everything ourselves. We relied heavily on external services for streaming, mobile, analytics, and more. The communication with these service providers worked differently than internal collaboration: documentation, conference hallway conversations, Slack channels, and writing detailed feedback gists became my new way of building trust. Some services even exposed their internal error rates directly to us, which was rare but incredibly useful.
The real learning came when I moved beyond tech. Marketing turned out to have the best metrics, monitoring, and A/B testing practices – they invented these before tech had the tools. HR taught me that you cannot break the SLA of paying your employees. Sales taught me that the speed we valued in deployment was equally critical in customer engagement – responding to interest fast while the heat is still there. Legal was like ops: invisible until something breaks, but signing a contract forced us to truly revisit all our security and privacy posture. Finance was the ultimate tester: if there is no money in the bank, the test has failed.
In the end, we worked incredibly hard but had to shut down the company because we could not achieve enough customer traction. DevOps was not our bottleneck – the pipeline from marketing through sales through DevOps through finance was far bigger than any single piece. The takeaway: wherever you sit in this pipeline, do not overestimate your power or underestimate the value of every other part of the company. And by now, I know unicorns do not exist. There are only horses.
Watch on YouTube – available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.