Episode

Everything's a Product With Sarah Morgan

Podcast: Arrested DevOps
Published: Aug 10, 2023
Duration seconds: 3060
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Canonical source: https://www.arresteddevops.com/everything-is-a-product/
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Summary

DevOps teams should treat their internal infrastructure and platforms as products to prevent shadow IT and improve service adoption. By applying product management principles like user validation and stakeholder empathy, engineers can build more resilient, useful internal services.

Topics

DevOps
Product Management
Platform Engineering
Internal Developer Platforms
Shadow IT
Observability
Incident Management
Stakeholder Engagement

Highlights

Main idea: Treat internal DevOps platforms as products with defined users and use cases to prevent engineers from seeking unmanaged alternatives
Failure mode: Launching MVPs or Proof of Concepts as permanent, concrete features that the team cannot later scale back or evolve
Practical takeaway: Always validate technical implementations with real-world use cases to avoid building tools that break under actual user behavior
Practical takeaway: Improve incident response by providing enriched context and architectural details rather than just forwarding raw complaints
Failure mode: Building 'cool' technology or adopting new tools based on industry hype without verifying a specific need or business value

Chapters

4:55 Applying Product Management to DevOps: Sarah Morgan discusses the transition from technical roles to product management and how product ownership applies to observability platforms.
16:45 The Danger of Unvalidated Features: A discussion on the risks of building features without understanding user behavior, leading to broken workflows and unexpected system failures.
23:55 Preventing Shadow IT: How treating internal infrastructure as a service can prevent engineers from adopting rogue, unmanaged platforms like Heroku.
27:35 Managing MVPs and Expectations: The importance of clearly communicating when a feature is an experiment versus a permanent, supported part of the platform.
39:30 The Value of Validation: Why technical effort should only be invested in projects that have been validated against actual organizational needs.
47:20 Effective Triage and Escalation: How product-oriented thinking helps engineers provide better context during incident escalation to reduce resolution time.
51:00 Start and Stop Strategies: Final advice on identifying stakeholders to build better tools and avoiding the trap of building unvalidated technology.