Unconventional Leadership Tactics Every DevOps Team Needs
Tap into the weird and wonderful world of DevOps leadership.
Stepping into the Chaos: Organized Leadership
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from running a DevOps team, it’s that chaos is not only inevitable but often beneficial. We once worked with a startup that grew from a cozy team of five to a bustling hive of 50 engineers in under a year. The rapid growth led to disorganized workflows, buggy deployments, and more “emergency” meetings than anyone cared for. It was like trying to conduct an orchestra with every musician playing a different symphony. But rather than cracking down on the chaos, the CTO embraced it.
He implemented Kanban boards to visualize work-in-progress and introduced a weekly “chaos day” where the team could tackle any process they felt was inefficient. This approach didn’t just organize the madness; it empowered team members to take leadership roles in solving problems. The result? A significant drop in cycle time and a product that reached market six months ahead of schedule.
Kanban and chaos might sound like strange bedfellows, but in this instance, they danced beautifully together. By seeing chaos as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, we can transform our workplaces into more agile, creative environments. It’s about creating a system that thrives in complexity, not one that quashes it.
Code Reviews and Open Communication: A Leader’s Balancing Act
Let’s face it—code reviews can sometimes feel like standing trial. But we’re here to tell you they don’t have to be painful. Encouraging open communication during code reviews can be a game-changer. Think of them as a chance for shared learning, rather than just a quality control measure.
A critical aspect of leadership in DevOps is fostering an atmosphere where developers feel comfortable sharing not just their code, but also their thoughts and ideas. This means shifting away from focusing solely on what’s wrong and instead highlighting what’s right, diving into why certain choices were made, and exploring alternative solutions together.
Picture this: our team was working on a crucial feature for a major release. The pressure was mounting, but instead of barking orders and setting rigid deadlines, we initiated bi-weekly team reviews. During these sessions, every developer had a chance to present their work and discuss challenges openly. What started as a technical review quickly evolved into a collaborative brainstorming session. By the end, not only was the feature completed on time, but it also included innovative elements we hadn’t even considered initially.
The next time you sit down for a code review, remember that leadership isn’t about dictating terms. It’s about inspiring creativity and trust within your team. As GitHub’s guide to code reviews suggests, when done correctly, these sessions can significantly enhance both code quality and team morale.
Automate Wisely: Don’t Let Tools Lead You
In the DevOps world, tools are everywhere. From CI/CD pipelines to infrastructure as code, automation can look like a magic wand. But let’s not get carried away and allow these tools to dictate leadership. Automation should serve us, not the other way around.
Here’s a fun fact: we once set up an automated deployment process that, in theory, should have reduced deployment time by 50%. Instead, it resulted in several failed deployments because no one took the time to configure it properly. Our enthusiasm for automation became a cautionary tale—highlighting the importance of understanding the tools before implementing them.
To avoid these pitfalls, it’s essential to craft careful configurations:
version: '2'
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Set up JDK 11
uses: actions/setup-java@v1
with:
java-version: '11'
While tools like Jenkins and Terraform are powerful allies, they require thoughtful planning and testing. Effective leaders know that automation is about enhancing productivity, not replacing human judgment. So before you jump on the latest tool bandwagon, take a step back and strategize how it fits into your broader objectives.
Embrace Failure: A Leadership Mindset Shift
Leadership isn’t about avoiding failure; it’s about how we respond to it. In a world where uptime is king, failure is often seen as the enemy. However, we’ve found that failure can be one of our greatest teachers.
Consider this: during a high-stakes project, a misconfigured load balancer led to a critical outage. The team could have scrambled to fix the issue quietly and move on, but instead, we used it as a learning opportunity. We conducted a blameless postmortem, dissected the root causes, and implemented safeguards to prevent similar issues in the future.
By embracing failure and encouraging transparency, leaders can cultivate a culture of continuous improvement. This approach aligns with the principles outlined in Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book, which advocates for building resilient systems through learning from outages.
Remember, every setback is an opportunity for growth. When teams feel safe to fail, innovation flourishes, and that’s where true leadership shines.
The Art of Saying No: Prioritization in Leadership
We all want to be the leader who says yes to innovation, yes to new features, and yes to every cool idea that comes our way. But sometimes, true leadership means saying no.
Take the case of a product team inundated with feature requests. Initially, they tried to accommodate everything, resulting in a bloated and unfocused product. It wasn’t until the team lead began prioritizing ruthlessly that things improved. The team focused on delivering fewer features at higher quality, aligning their efforts with the company’s strategic goals.
In DevOps, prioritization is crucial. Tools like RICE scoring can help you evaluate potential projects based on reach, impact, confidence, and effort. By applying such frameworks, leaders ensure that their teams are not just busy, but productive and purposeful.
Remember, every “no” is a step toward a more meaningful “yes.” Leadership is about guiding your team through the noise and focusing on what truly matters.
Building Trust Through Transparency
Trust is the cornerstone of effective leadership. One way to build this trust is through transparency—whether it’s sharing the rationale behind decisions or openly discussing company performance.
During a particularly challenging fiscal quarter, our leadership team decided to share financial reports with the entire organization. This level of transparency fostered a sense of ownership and accountability among team members. Rather than feeling left in the dark, employees rallied together to identify cost-saving measures and boost productivity.
Transparency also involves open discussions around progress and setbacks. Utilizing dashboards and metrics, such as those available via Grafana, allows teams to track key performance indicators and make informed decisions.
Remember, when leaders are transparent, they create an environment where people feel valued and motivated to contribute. It transforms “us vs. them” into “we’re all in this together.”
The Unexpected Power of Humor in Leadership
Lastly, let’s talk about humor. It’s easy to overlook, but humor is a potent tool in a leader’s arsenal. It brings levity to stressful situations, fosters camaraderie, and can even diffuse tension during heated discussions.
Consider a tense moment during a pre-release crunch. Tempers were high, and frustration was mounting. Our team lead lightened the mood with a well-timed joke about the absurdity of software bugs, and laughter rippled through the room. That simple moment of levity helped the team reset, refocus, and ultimately meet their deadline.
Humor isn’t about being a stand-up comedian—it’s about authenticity and connection. When leaders show their human side, it encourages others to do the same, breaking down barriers and building stronger teams.
Incorporating humor into leadership practices doesn’t require a radical change. Start small, be genuine, and watch as your team becomes more engaged and resilient.
“Embrace failure” is hard to sell when management has cut the QA budget and expects release confidence to stay flat. Flaky tests need ownership and time, not just a blameless postmortem.
A weekly chaos day is not really a ceremony if people can pick any process problem; it is better described as an improvement allocation. How did the team protect that time once headcount and delivery pressure increased?
please do a follow-up on zero-downtime database migrations, especially locks during deploys. who owns the rollback when a schema change wont complete?
We lived through a migration that held a lock during a deploy and left the application timing out while rollback ownership was unclear. The remediation took longer because management had rejected dedicated database change coverage as extra headcount. We should publish a follow-up focused on lock-aware migrations and explicit rollback ownership
Kanban did not save us when a routing change blackholed traffic across three regions… topology and failure domains still matter, and at 50 engineers the cloud bill matters too.
Automation does not reduce toil if nobody owns the runners, secrets, patching, and failed jobs. Management calls it headcount savings, then wonders why deploys are broke at 2am.
The deployment example is fair, but the YAML shown is a GitHub Actions workflow, not a general automation configuration. We run GitLab CI with Terraform and Argo CD, and the failures at 3am are usually missing assumptions between those layers rather than the pipeline itself. At my job, an auto-deploy passed because the health check only hit the process port, while the application was failing every real request. We added smoke tests and progressive delivery, which cost time the delivery manager initially refused to fund. That argument changed after two overnight rollbacks and a week of support tickets. Automation needs an explicit operational owner, not a vague belief that the platform team will absorb it
Did GitLab smoke tests measure real requests, not just health?
RICE can make the backlog look rational while the pipeline is still held together by one on-call engineer. Could you do a follow-up on budgeting platform maintenance against feature work?
We use GitHub Actions, Terraform, and Argo CD, and we have seen RICE bury runner upgrades and state recovery behind feature scores. Our preferred approach is to reserve visible capacity for platform maintenance, with on-call load and incident risk reported beside feature delivery. We should write about making that trade-off legible to finance
We tried saying yes to every enterprise request once, because sales had already promised half of them. the roadmap became a list of exceptions, and customers noticed that the basics kept arriving late. I argued for two more engineers, finance asked why we could not just prioritise harder. Saying no only works when leadership is willing to explain the lost revenue conversation.
disagree: chaos needs guardrails; calico policies do not improvise
i disagree; after headcount cuts, guardrails became paperwork nobody staffed.
we had a load balancer outage caused by a bad health check, and the postmortem found three missing alerts. my previous employer required rollback tests before every change, which was slower but safer.