Several disciplines, one accountability
Lead software development, quality engineering and CloudOps as a single function, owning technology strategy, delivery roadmaps, technical debt and the operational risk that comes with running the platform.
Leadership, 2021-Present, nimbus Cloud
Development, quality and operations are usually three separate teams with a queue between each pair. That is a structural problem rather than an effort problem, and no amount of goodwill fixes a design where one team is a mandatory dependency for everyone else's delivery.
It shows up as the same symptoms every time: quality discovered late, operations treated as a ticket desk, and engineers who never see a change all the way through to production.
I run them as one function with one accountability. Development, quality engineering and CloudOps are planned together and measured on the same outcomes, rather than on handovers between them.
Quality engineers sit with delivery, not downstream of it, so the people who care most about testability are in the room when the design happens. CloudOps builds paved roads rather than processing requests, and the measure of their success is how rarely anyone needs them.
Above that sits the part of the job that is not code: technology strategy developed with product management, roadmaps that survive contact with commercial reality, deliberate management of technical debt rather than the pretence that it does not exist, and vendor contracts negotiated so the tooling budget goes where the leverage is.
Delivery, quality and operations plan as one group, which removed the queues that used to set the pace.
Technical debt and SLA performance are reported automatically and reviewed like any other business metric, so the trade-offs get made deliberately rather than by default.
Team Leadership, Technology Strategy, Agile Delivery, Technical Debt, Vendor Negotiation