The value of different kinds of work

Engineering operations teams, or platform engineering, traditionally think of themselves as the “X technology” team. That is partly true. But the mindset risks alienating your customers, and it complicates prioritization and communication.

Who are the customers?

They are all inside the business:

• product engineering teams
• risk management
• finance
• leadership
• support
• every employee

DevOps

The biggest customers are product engineering, risk management and finance. Product engineering is the obvious one: DevOps builds the foundational infrastructure that automates deployments, scales with load and provides test environments. Risk management values infrastructure that follows best practice and the company’s own compliance and risk guidelines. And this team usually holds the keys to the biggest vendor spend, for a SaaS company, so it always has finance’s attention.

SRE

The biggest customers are product engineering, support and risk management. SRE provides the infrastructure, tools, patterns and practices that cut the time product engineering and support spend troubleshooting production, including false alarms. Keeping outages short also puts the company at less financial and reputational risk, which keeps risk management happy.

IT and TechOps

The biggest customers are every employee, risk management and finance. Much like DevOps, but highly specialized: IT makes sure every employee can do their job as quickly as possible, while exposing the company to as little risk and cost as it can. That scope needs a huge range of tools and practices, often from third-party vendors, which makes IT best friends with finance.

Data

For a SaaS company, data is gold. The customers are every employee, leadership and risk management. Everyone needs data to do their job well, and the data team is responsible for data that is accessible, accurate and easy to understand. Leadership especially needs it to watch the key areas of the business. And risk management pays close attention to data security and compliance.