How to Make Sure Your DevOps Strategy Aligns with Business Objectives

Introduction

If implemented correctly, it can bridge the gap between business expectations and the work of development teams. Naturally, this can pose some challenges – especially, if you don’t have experience putting a DevOps strategy in place.

If that’s what you’re currently facing at your organization, then here are my recommendations as a DevOps leader.

Tips for aligning DevOps strategy with business objectives

The role of DevOps is to integrate software development and IT operations to achieve faster delivery cycles, better software quality, and reliability. These “technical” outcomes directly impact business objectives like faster time to market, higher customer satisfaction, and improved operational efficiency. 

A well-crafted DevOps strategy should perfectly align with the company’s goals. Here are a few tips on how to do that:

1. Define clear business objectives

The first step is to set clear, measurable goals. From my experience, the trickiest part is defining what ‘clear’ actually means. Business stakeholders have a vision of what they’d like to achieve, but – since many lack a technical background – they don’t have the means to translate their vision into tangible IT outcomes. 

So, how can you go about this? I recommend breaking down large-scale business objectives into smaller technical metrics. Make sure they can be measured numerically, as it will make it much clearer for IT to understand what exactly is being assessed.

These could include, for example, “increasing page load time by X%, or “boosting application uptime to reach 99.99%”.

2. Establish metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

To align DevOps strategy with business objectives it’s key to come up with a robust framework to measure success. This includes metrics and KPIs. The tech team usually defines the former, while the latter come from the business. 

Tal Holtzer, CEO of VPSServer, shares this perspective. He told me that a pivotal moment in their DevOps efficiency was when they built a KPI that established a connection between the frequency of deployment and level of client satisfaction.

“We were able to encourage our DevOps and business teams to interact more effectively by evaluating the rate at which we issue updates and making certain that these updates lead to improvements in both uptime and performance. 

The final result? As well as higher rates of client retention, there was a 25% increase in deployment efficiency,” said Holtzer.

Bear in mind that metrics inform KPIs. Here are a few types you can consider – they’re jointly known as DORA metrics:

• Deployment frequency. The shorter it is, the faster a new product can be launched.
• Mean time to recover (MTTR). Reduced MTTR minimizes downtime and, as a result, boosts customer satisfaction.
• Lead time for changes. It shows how agile the team is. Shorter lead times allow teams to move from ideas to production quickly, meeting market demands and customer expectations.
• Change failure rate. This metric lets you track the occurrence of issues in the deployment stage and others that impact your system’s stability.

When teams track these metrics alongside business outcomes, they can better understand how their work impacts the organization’s goals. 

Gal Cohen, Business Development Leader & Field Area Manager at JDM Sliding Doors, shared a great example of how this can work out in practice. Making the DevOps team responsible for “time-to-resolution” instead of ‘just’ system uptime made them understand their wider role in the business. He says the company became aware of tracking the wrong metrics as they restructured their scheduling system.

“We had occasional sync errors where task details wouldn’t update at all, causing technicians to show up to appointments without the right information. This wasn’t a technical outage, so traditional uptime metrics wouldn’t flag it. For our business, it was a real problem. Once we shifted DevOps accountability to "time-to-resolution," they started treating these issues as revenue blockers rather than just minor glitches,” Cohen said. After this came to light, the company automated self-healing scripts to detect and resolve sync failures – even before a technician realized there was a problem.

3. Foster cross-functional collaboration

Breaking down silos is one of the key principles behind DevOps. Businesses need to make sure that it extends beyond different members of the product development team and also includes perspectives from marketing, sales, and customer support. 

These stakeholders are so important when shaping your DevOps strategy because they can provide feedback loops from customers and other departments.

This brings me to an important point – who we define as a ‘customer’ largely depends on the size of our organization. At small-to-medium-sized businesses like Brainhub, customers are the end users of an application or product. 

These people can provide their opinions – in a more or less anonymized way – on what they think works well vs what needs improvements and why. But if you work at a large enterprise, your customers might actually be your organization’s internal departments.

As you can imagine, cross-functional collaboration will vary between small businesses and enterprises. The former will likely see a straightforward company-client relationship, while the latter will have complex internal and external structures. Recognizing these differences will help you understand where, when, and from whom to collect feedback in the first place.

Let me give you an example of how we align our development roadmaps with market demand at Brainhub.

As my colleague Mateusz Konieczny explains in our report “From Vision to Code”, “our technology decisions at Brainhub are fundamentally business-driven, always focused on the WHY behind each choice and carefully determining the HOW to deliver it”. 

To make sure that everything we decide fits the broader company strategy (not ‘just’ engineering goals), we turn to structured frameworks like decision matrixes and Tech Radar. We also refer to Proof of Concept documents from our R&D team constantly. 

This helps us keep a clear picture of the objectives, so we can optimize each team’s work for scalability, speed, and productivity.

Each company, of course, will have their own “go-to” techniques. To give you another example, Robbert Bink of Crypto Recovers told me that what works exceptionally well to keep DevOps and business on the same page are shared dashboards. It allows both sides to track key performance metrics in real time, breaking down the communication silos that often exist. 

“For example, we set up metrics such as deployment frequency and lead time for changes—crucial DevOps KPIs—alongside business-oriented metrics like customer churn rate and feature adoption. A specific instance where this proved invaluable was during the launch of a new recovery tool for crypto wallets. By seeing how quicker deployments directly impacted user feedback and feature adoption rates, both teams were motivated to collaborate more effectively, ultimately resulting in a successful and well-received launch,” said Bink. 

4. Leverage automation strategically

Automation can be a great asset in DevOps, enabling work consistency and speed. 

In a survey we ran for the “From Vision to Code” report, we found that 78% of organizations that declare a high level of commitment to DevOps also mention that automation plays a big part. 

For example, by automating testing and deployment pipelines, you can achieve goals like faster feature rollouts and spare your team the manual effort. 

That said, I want to underline that there are certain limits as to when automation is still helpful, and where it can become a burden itself. If completing a task takes you literally a minute or two, then trying to automate it won’t be worth your time and effort.

Certain tasks can be completed faster and at a lower expense by continuing to do them manually. What you should automate are complex processes, where you can clearly see the productivity advantages you’ll gain. 

So, when working on your  DevOps strategy, I strongly suggest that you double-check you’re not automating processes that don’t genuinely need it.

5. Prioritize continuous improvement

DevOps practices embrace continuous improvement, making them a perfect fit for the changing nature of business strategies. Regular retrospectives and data-driven adjustments ensure that teams quickly adapt to evolving business priorities, address inefficiencies promptly, and refine processes for long-term success. 

Before I discuss each point in more detail, let me explain what I mean by data-driven adjustments. 

I often come across companies that use all the data they have just for the sake of being data-driven. Hardly ever do they consider what each data piece means, where it comes from, and if it’s real data. Making decisions based on data that isn’t verified and reliable can have serious consequences. 

Adapting to changing business priorities is self-explanatory, and agile teams shouldn’t have any problems with such adjustments. In terms of addressing inefficiencies promptly, it’s crucial to first properly define what an inefficiency is. 

DevOps teams usually get a lot of alerts to stay up to date with what’s happening with a system. If the same alert appears every week, then it’s a clear sign that there is an inefficiency in the system, which must be tackled first before delivering any new features. 

From my experience, it’s better to spend two extra days at the beginning of the project on solving specific issues, instead of postponing them for later as it will only lead to more technical debt. Refining processes from the start is often a better move than delivering new features with half-baked processes. Long-term, this will lead to faster deployments and greater reliability.

6. Invest in a customer-centric mindset

The ultimate step to aligning DevOps strategy with business objectives is staying customer-focused. While DevOps teams aren’t usually responsible for gathering feedback, as it’s the job of marketing and customer support, they must analyze it. Only then will they be able to make sure that new features or fixes address customer needs. 

Maintaining high customer satisfaction is a business objective, but it cannot be achieved without keeping the system fully operational – and that’s the domain of DevOps. 

7. Adopt agile principles

This list, of course, would not be complete without mentioning Agile principles. The DORA metrics I referred to earlier would be impossible to reach without building your work around an agile methodology. Teams that integrate agile into their workflows can:

• Respond swiftly to market changes.
• Deliver incremental value to customers.
• Align with business demands in real-time.

Your DevOps strategy needs to reflect both tech and business perspectives

Only when metrics and KPIs are fully aligned, can DevOps and business work towards the same goal. To do this effectively, you need to put a strategy in place, and ensure everyone communicates with each other ongoingly. It’s also extremely important that everyone knows what they’re responsible for, and where their work will overlap with that of others on the team.