7It's All About the Product
Gene Kim is widely viewed as a spokesperson for DevOps. (DevOps is a set of ideas pertaining to delivering software rapidly at scale.) His 2013 book The Phoenix Project catapulted DevOps into the awareness of the wider IT community. He has also defined what he believes are the core principles of DevOps. He calls these the “Three Ways [of DevOps]”.1 On the first “way” he writes,
The First Way emphasizes the performance of the entire system, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department — this can be as large as a division (e.g., Development or IT Operations) or as small as an individual contributor (e.g., a developer, system administrator).
His point is that what matters is the product and its platform, which he refers to as the entire system. These matter more than the work unit, meaning any organizational unit such as a team.
While DevOps methods arose in the arena of software, the ideas are entirely applicable to all kinds of products. This is especially true as more and more products are created through digital design and manufacturing methods.
There is a strong focus on teams in Agile thinking, as well as in DevOps thinking. This is because work is more scalable if teams are able to operate independently. However, for a multiteam product, no team is completely autonomous. Otherwise, there is not a product. Instead, there are many products—one for each team.
The product needs to be the focus, not the team. When one creates ...
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