Dan Rogers Of LaunchDarkly: Five Essential Components Of A Successful DevOps Team

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Collaboration-Obsessed: Modern software is not developed in a vacuum. The most successful DevOps teams must be highly collaborative to integrate across the organization and come together to solve technical challenges. How well your team collaborates is directly correlated to the strength of the product and the velocity of releasing it.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, DevOps has emerged as an essential philosophy, bridging the gap between software development and IT operations. A successful DevOps team not only speeds up the delivery process but ensures quality and reliability. However, creating such a team requires a harmonious amalgamation of tools, culture, processes, collaboration, and more. What are the critical components of a top-notch DevOps team, and how can organizations integrate them for optimum results? As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Rogers.

Dan Rogers is the CEO of LaunchDarkly, where he is leading the team through its next phase of growth. He has an extensive background leading diverse, cross-functional, high-performance teams at some of the world’s fastest-growing technology companies including Rubrik, ServiceNow, AWS, and Microsoft. Most recently, Dan served as president at Rubrik, where he helped them surpass $600M ARR while leading their product, marketing, and GTM strategy teams.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?

Silicon Valley has been like a tractor beam that pulled me through my career and to this place. Even while having grown up in England, I knew this region of the world fostered the spirit of innovation that I desperately had to be part of.

There were two canonical things that I read that really led me down this path. The first was a book that I read in the late 1990s called Bold New World: The Essential Guide to Surviving and Prospering in the Twenty-First Century by William Knoke. It reframed how important technology was going to be for modern society; back then, it wasn’t as obvious as it is today. The second was a little into my career: the essay Why software is eating the world by Marc Andreessen. We can look at that idea now and see that software is no longer eating the world. Software has completely consumed the world.

These pieces stick out as moments in my career that helped me realize: I am excited by innovation. I have a revolutionary spirit, and the modern form of revolution is through technology and software. As someone who wanted to change the world, I decided that that’s how I wanted to do that. So as a youngster in Europe, I got on the digital equivalent of getting on the boat to come over to America.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I always had energy and drive, and a willingness to out-hustle, but it was my early managers at Accenture and Microsoft who helped me harness my energy, and put me into manager and leadership programs to develop my craft. I will be forever grateful to them, and to these two companies in particular who have world-class development programs.

Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?

Keeping a growth mindset, understanding the 3- to 5-year vision, and positivity. Those three things have helped me get to where I am today.

I am wired with a growth mindset and the notion that you don’t need to get too worried about whether something you did right now is all that successful, as long as you’re preoccupied with how you can improve. So I spend very little time lingering on accomplishments and more time harvesting the learnings and what we are going to do better next time. Once you settle on the idea that challenges are just an opportunity to grow and learn, the mind can be really liberated. I recently reread a quote by Marcus Aurelius — ‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ And it really embodies this idea that things are going to be tough if you want to do anything great.

Being a futuristic thinker allows me to see the goal three, five, or even 10 years down the road and use that vision to determine how to move forward. I don’t dwell on the past or even in the immediate moment. Technology happens in these broad arcs, and as a five-year thinker, I tend to assess the likelihood of the grassroots we are seeing today blossoming. If you look at something like Generative AI and cast your mind forward five years, it’s obvious it is going to have a profound implication for healthcare, retail, education, banking, and software development itself. Then all you have to do is rewind from that future to today to figure out what moves you need to make to capitalize on that eventuality.

Both of those things help me to remain positive. Positivity keeps me grounded in that growth mindset and the futuristic thinking that I believe will ultimately lead me and my teams down the right path into the future.

Which skills are you still trying to grow now?

At LaunchDarkly our mission is to help software teams build experiences customers love. And it turns out that the context that software developers are operating in, is rapidly changing. With the maturation of dev ops tools and the emergence of generative AI, we will be producing more code and more applications than ever before. My role is to help developers to navigate this new reality, to do that I need to be attuned to both the struggles and opportunities of today, but also to place bets on how this space is going to evolve. It requires equal parts empathy, deep user understanding, and trend mapping. This is where I spend my efforts.

What are the key goals a DevOps team might identify for a digital transformation journey?

Digital transformation journeys vary by business type, structure, and industry. However, in general, the key goals a DevOps team might identify for a digital transformation journey include accelerating software delivery through CI/CD pipelines, enhancing software quality and reliability with automated testing and monitoring, improving collaboration using cross-functional teams and communication tools, and maximizing business impact through experimentation. They should also strive to foster a culture of continuous improvement with feedback loops and ongoing learning, lingering on failures only to create momentum forward. Goals should not just be about enhancing technical capabilities but also about aligning efforts with broader strategic objectives to deliver exceptional value to customers.

Are there any challenges or common pitfalls that DevOps teams should consider?

A significant challenge arises when a “DevOps team” becomes a middleman between application developers and the infrastructure IT team, defeating the original purpose of bridging the gap between development and operations. Any DevOps team should be composed of a mix of skill sets both on the systems administration and application developer sides with people who respect each other’s capabilities, and can build strong relationships across the IT organization regardless of which box they sit in in an org chart.

How can effective collaboration and communication among team members enhance the productivity and success of a DevOps team, and what practices can facilitate this?

The origin of the DevOps movement in 2007–09 was about ending dysfunction and frustration between traditional software developers and application infrastructure operators. We did this by building trust between those teams and collaboration and communication were explicitly part of building that trust. However, the tools available to anyone working in IT seriously impeded the ability of teams to collaborate and communicate. The required messaging, monitoring, observability, and release engineering software tools (including LaunchDarkly) have only finally become both mature and widely adopted over the last few years as organizations made their accelerated pushes during Covid to digitally transform.

With these mature tools deployed, teams can get back to the basics of building relationships between team members. In some ways, the software available to most teams has actually outpaced the relationships team members have with each other, and so the real work is in making sure teammates trust each other and can work most effectively together. Allowing teams to create meaningful bonds in person like having off-sites, team building exercises, and even traveling to conferences, like GALAXY ’24 which we just hosted in San Francisco, are often the most productive investments. Building relationships face-to-face can enhance the productivity and success of a DevOps team.

What role does CI/CD play in DevOps, and what are the best practices for implementing CI/CD pipelines to ensure a seamless and reliable software release process?

CI/CD is critical as a tool for a bigger purpose: rapid, confident deployments. There are a host of concepts, tools, and best practices your team is using. A good litmus test for where your organization stands is to ask how long it takes for a developer who has just joined your organization to ship one line of code to production, and when is it served to an end user. One hour? One day? A week? Months?

When that question is at the lower time bound such as an hour or day, you have you ask yourselves the questions of: Does the organization feel confident that there are guardrails in place to automatically catch defects? Is there appropriate observability for what is happening both during the release process and after the code is deployed? Is your organization able to ensure the code that is released can be turned on and off without redeploying if an issue is discovered? These high-level questions allow you to quickly gauge the maturity of your organization, where you are strong, and where you need to figure out what CI/CD best practices still need to be applied to get better.

How does fostering a DevOps culture and mindset contribute to the overall success of a DevOps team, and what strategies can organizations use to promote this culture among their development and operations teams?

DevOps was originally built as a shared responsibility between application developers and infrastructure operations, so keeping the original principles in mind when reinforcing your culture is important. It is common in large organizations for words with specific meanings — such as DevOps or Agile — to be gradually redefined so that their original meaning outside of your organization is different than within your organization. Ask both your leaders and individual developers if their understanding of the practices within your organization matches what is known in the broader IT industry, or if a practice such as Agile has actually inadvertently turned back into a Waterfall model because of organizational inertia.

What are the “5 Essential Components of a Successful DevOps Team”? Please share a story or example for each.

There is no great software team that isn’t passionate, which is why I try to steer my teams toward a culture of being obsessed with software. More specifically, the most successful DevOps teams are obsessed with five things: velocity, customers, collaboration, risk, and learning. Together, these allow teams to move forward at the speed of evolving technology, meet and anticipate business needs, and unlock unparalleled success.

1. Velocity-Obsessed: The single most important principle of a DevOps team is getting real products into the hands of real customers as quickly as possible. Only when customers have the product in their hands will DevOps teams know its success and how to evolve it to be even better. Every member of a DevOps team must be energized by shipping software, and fast. How? Automate everything and avoid over-engineering and over-testing, even if systems become complex. The more velocity with which teams can work, the faster they can ship software into customers’ hands; and the speed with which their companies ship software is the biggest competitive advantage.
2. Customer-Obsessed: Customers should be the North Star for DevOps teams. Software is not made for its own sake; it’s made to delight the customers who use it. The arbiter of any software is the customer who uses it. Focus on things that improve the customer experience like performance enhancements, latency reductions, and solving the problems its users are facing — not internal business needs.
3. Collaboration-Obsessed: Modern software is not developed in a vacuum. The most successful DevOps teams must be highly collaborative to integrate across the organization and come together to solve technical challenges. How well your team collaborates is directly correlated to the strength of the product and the velocity of releasing it.
4. Risk-Obsessed: DevOps teams must be attuned to the common patterns of risk and understand what each adjustment in software could cause. This can increase innovative velocity because it allows teams to understand which steps can be automated, what doesn’t need to be tested, where to use third-party integrations, and more. Balancing speed versus risk is an important factor in getting software out the door and into the customers’ hands.
5. Learning-Obsessed: Last but not least, successful DevOps teams are full of developers who want to learn, are naturally inquisitive, and apply curiosity to solve the problems businesses are facing. These teams want to know how to ship better software, faster and are always expanding their skill sets to keep up with the speed of innovation and produce more creative solutions.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I want to inspire a movement toward clean energy.

I believe clean energy will be one of the most existential challenges in my lifetime — and we’ll need to create some type of tech disruption to truly decarbonize society. The fundamental scientific building blocks we have put in place since the 1880s from electricity generation to cement, and plastics to fertilizers all present “hard” challenges we will need to reimagine for the next generation. It’s going to be the next frontier of scientific discovery.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.