How to Set the Right DevOps Goals and Align Them with Business Objectives?

Setting the right DevOps goals

The key to set the right goals for your DevOps team is to integrate them with your company’s objectives.

Especially if your project is not meeting its business goals and questions about the effectiveness of DevOps practices arise. 

So, if:

• you’re fed up with the pressure to demonstrate how DevOps contributes to business outcomes
• you have difficulties in quantifying DevOps success
• and you need to set up your DevOps team’s goals for the next quarter or year…

… it’s time to bridge the gap between business KPIs and DevOps goals.

Let’s do this, step by step.

Don’t set DevOps goals without your business in mind

The lack of clear metrics to assess DevOps’ contribution to overarching business goals may be a serious drawback to deployment quality and pace improvement. 

Just like teams working in isolation without a shared understanding of goals or priorities – they’re just not as productive as they could be. 

To set wrongs to rights, it’s vital to make sure that all stakeholders understand DevOps principles and how they tie to business outcomes.

Learning how to set clear, measurable DevOps goals that support organizational outcomes and addressing common challenges (like team silos, tool integration, and cultural resistance) will make things very different for you. And for the organizations you work for, too.

Business goals and product development should be in sync, so that the software that is being developed directly reflects the company’s vision and objectives.

<span class="colorbox1" es-test-element="box1"><p>Learn more about technology and business alignment: How to Align Business with Software Development Objectives</p></span>

‍Benefits of business and DevOps goals alignment for CTOs

Business and DevOps objectives alignment can help tech leaders focus on their priorities and address their goals, like speeding up software delivery, optimizing processes, and achieving innovation. There are many tangible effects and valuable benefits of DevOps and business goals alignment for CTOs. 

Some of them include:

• increased productivity due to the right resource allocation,
• creating high-impact features,
• faster time-to-market,
• reducing operational waste,
• increased possibility of project success,
• seizing market opportunities to the fullest,
• enhancing product-market fit,
• driving impactful business outcomes that truly matter.

Streamlined collaboration and continuous improvement results in meeting business goals at an impressive pace. Of course, time is money, so business and DevOps objectives alignment often brings CTOs – and their companies – substantial savings.

Now, if we’ve got this settled, it’s time to move on to practice.

What are the core goals of DevOps?

The core goals of DevOps are to accelerate software delivery, improve system reliability, and foster a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams. At its heart, DevOps is about breaking down silos to enable faster, more efficient workflows that align with business objectives. 

For you, this means streamlining the software development lifecycle with automation, continuous integration, and delivery pipelines to reduce time-to-market without sacrificing quality. 

DevOps also emphasizes monitoring, incident response, and infrastructure as code, ensuring scalability and resilience in production environments. 

Ultimately, DevOps is about creating a feedback-driven culture that empowers teams to deliver value consistently, adapt to change quickly, and reduce operational friction - all critical to staying competitive in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Core DevOps goals - examples

Goal 1: Accelerate software delivery

Reduce time-to-market by implementing CI/CD pipelines. Ensure every code change is tested, integrated, and deployed automatically to deliver features and updates faster. Speed is critical to staying competitive - you need to optimize your pipelines to remove bottlenecks.

Goal 2: Improve system reliability
Increase uptime and performance with proactive monitoring, robust incident management, and automated infrastructure provisioning through infrastructure as code. Resilient systems are a non-negotiable foundation for customer trust and operational efficiency.

Goal 3: Foster cross-team collaboration
Break down silos between development, operations, and other stakeholders by promoting a culture of shared ownership and communication. Use tools and processes that align teams.

Goal 4: Increase automation
Automate repetitive tasks - testing, deployments, and environment setup - to reduce errors and save your teams’ time. Consistency and speed through automation create a stable environment for scaling innovation.

Goal 5: Enhance scalability
Design architectures that scale efficiently to meet growth demands. Leverage cloud-native solutions and automate scaling mechanisms to maintain performance even under increased load. Scalability isn’t optional.

Goal 6: Build feedback-driven processes
Adopt tools that provide real-time monitoring, logging, and feedback. A feedback loop ensures your teams can detect and resolve issues faster while continuously improving processes and product quality.

Goal 7: Promote security through DevSecOps

Bake security into every phase of the development lifecycle. Automate vulnerability scans, enforce compliance, and secure your pipelines without slowing delivery. Security is a value-add, not an afterthought - make it seamless.

How to align it with your business objectives?

1. Start with business outcomes

Ask: What are the company’s key objectives? Are you prioritizing faster innovation, reducing operational costs, scaling to meet demand, or improving customer satisfaction?
DevOps isn’t an end in itself - it’s a means to deliver business value. For example, if the goal is to reduce churn, focus on reliability, rapid bug fixes, and feature delivery. If cost efficiency is key, automation and cloud optimization take precedence.

2. Assess the current state of your teams and systems

Evaluate your starting point with a clear-eyed assessment of your teams and infrastructure. Ask critical questions: Do you have robust CI/CD pipelines? Is your team siloed? How much manual effort is spent on routine tasks? Are your monitoring tools providing actionable insights? This evaluation helps pinpoint where gaps exist between your current state and your business objectives.

Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies that hinder alignment with business needs. For example:

• If deployments are frequent but uncoordinated, collaboration or release management might be the issue. Consider adopting tools like Jira for planning and Slack for communication during releases.
• If downtime impacts revenue, system reliability and proactive incident management should take precedence. Ensure you have redundancy, automated failover systems, and robust monitoring tools like Prometheus or Datadog in place.
• If releases are delayed due to manual testing, automated test suites and quality gates in your CI/CD pipelines should be prioritized to streamline the release cycle.
• If infrastructure changes take too long, infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Ansible can automate provisioning and ensure consistency across environments.
• If developers are spending too much time troubleshooting environments, provide standardized, self-service environments using tools like Docker or Kubernetes.
• If security vulnerabilities are detected late in the cycle, adopt DevSecOps practices to integrate automated security scans and policies into the development workflow.
• If your cloud costs are spiraling, analyze usage patterns, optimize resources, and adopt tools like AWS Trusted Advisor or Kubernetes autoscaling to reduce waste.

3. Map technical goals to strategic needs

Once you’ve identified the business outcomes, translate them into actionable technical goals. Every DevOps initiative should address a specific business need, ensuring a direct line of sight between technical efforts and measurable results. Here are some common business scenarios and how they map to DevOps goals:

Need faster time-to-market?

• Prioritize: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment strategies.
• Example: Automate the build-test-deploy cycle to cut manual intervention and deliver features to production in hours instead of weeks. Streamline developer workflows with tools that integrate seamlessly with version control systems like GitHub or GitLab.

Need to build trust with enterprise clients?

• Prioritize: Reliability, scalability, and security measures.
• Example: Use DevSecOps practices to integrate automated security scans into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring compliance without delaying releases. Add SLAs and real-time system monitoring to improve uptime and proactively address performance bottlenecks.

Preparing for a high-growth phase?

• Prioritize: Scalable architectures and automated provisioning.
• Example: Transition to containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes to efficiently manage growth. Automate infrastructure provisioning with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to quickly respond to demand surges.

Struggling with frequent outages or incidents?

• Prioritize: Proactive monitoring and incident management.
• Example: Implement observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog to monitor system health in real-time. Introduce automated alerts and playbooks to standardize incident response and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).

Facing inefficiencies from manual processes?

• Prioritize: Automation of repetitive tasks.
• Example: Automate regression testing, deployments, and environment setups using tools like Jenkins, Ansible, or GitHub Actions. This reduces human error and frees up engineers for higher-value work.

Worried about vendor lock-in or tech debt?

• Prioritize: Cloud portability and modular architecture.
• Example: Adopt multi-cloud strategies with platforms like Kubernetes to avoid dependency on a single provider. Refactor legacy applications into microservices to reduce tech debt and improve flexibility.

Struggling to innovate due to developer friction?

• Prioritize: Developer experience and feedback loops.
• Example: Create self-service environments where developers can spin up test environments on demand. Use monitoring and logging tools to provide actionable feedback on code quality and performance.

Need to reduce costs while maintaining performance?

• Prioritize: Cloud cost optimization and resource efficiency.
• Example: Implement automated scaling policies, utilize reserved or spot instances, and monitor usage with tools like AWS Cost Explorer or Google Cloud Operations Suite to optimize cloud spend without sacrificing performance.

Trying to improve cross-team alignment?

• Prioritize: Collaboration tools and shared ownership.
• Example: Foster transparency with dashboards that show deployment status, system health, and metrics in real-time. Encourage shared goals between development, operations, and product teams, using platforms like Slack or Jira to streamline communication.

Every DevOps goal must directly serve a tangible business purpose.

4. Prioritize for impact and ROI

You can’t do everything at once. Focus on goals that will yield the highest return on investment. Consider:

• Impact on revenue: What will reduce friction for customers or boost scalability?
• Risk mitigation: Where are the critical vulnerabilities that could disrupt business?
• Efficiency gains: What will free up team capacity to innovate instead of firefighting?

High-impact, low-cost initiatives (e.g., automating testing or implementing basic monitoring) should typically come first.

5. Embed metrics and accountability

Aligning goals to business objectives requires measurement. Define success criteria and track progress with KPIs, such as:

• Deployment frequency (speed)
• Mean time to recovery (reliability)
• Cost per deployment (efficiency)
• Vulnerabilities resolved per sprint (security)

These metrics ensure your team’s work directly supports business results and keeps efforts accountable.

The role of key DevOps metrics

DevOps is only as effective as your ability to measure its impact. You need to track both high-level business outcomes and operational performance.

These key DevOps metrics, or KPIs, help organizations track the business results – like the performance, revenue growth, and customer satisfaction – as well as the efficiency of DevOps processes. Let’s take a look at some examples.

1. DORA metrics

Developed by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group, these four metrics are widely regarded as the gold standard for measuring DevOps effectiveness:

• Deployment Frequency:
  Measures how often you deploy changes to production. High-performing teams deploy multiple times a day, reflecting agility and efficiency.some text
  • Why it matters: Frequent deployments indicate streamlined workflows and the ability to deliver value to customers rapidly.
• Lead Time for Changes:
  Tracks the time it takes for a code commit to be deployed in production. Short lead times demonstrate that teams can adapt quickly to changing requirements.some text
  • Why it matters: A shorter lead time directly correlates with faster time-to-market and increased responsiveness to user needs.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR):
  Measures how quickly your team can recover from an incident or failure in production. High-performing teams aim for hours, not days.some text
  • Why it matters: A fast recovery time minimizes disruption to customers and mitigates revenue loss during outages.
• Change Failure Rate:
  Tracks the percentage of changes that lead to production failures. High-performing teams maintain a low rate (e.g., less than 15%), which reflects a combination of strong testing, automation, and deployment processes.some text
  • Why it matters: A low failure rate shows that teams can deliver reliable updates without compromising quality.

2. System reliability metrics

Reliability directly affects user experience and business reputation. Use metrics that highlight system health and performance:

• Uptime and availability:
  Track your system’s uptime percentage (e.g., "four nines" or 99.99%) to ensure reliable service.
• Latency and response times:
  Measure how quickly your system responds to requests, especially for customer-facing services.
• Incident frequency and resolution time:
  Monitor how often incidents occur and how quickly they are resolved. Tools like PagerDuty or ServiceNow can help track these.

3. Automation and efficiency metrics

Automation is a cornerstone of DevOps. Monitor metrics that show its impact:

• Test automation coverage:
  Track the percentage of your codebase covered by automated tests. Higher coverage reduces the risk of introducing bugs.
• Manual effort reduction:
  Measure how many tasks have been automated over time (e.g., builds, deployments, monitoring alerts).
• Cycle time:
  Track the time it takes for a work item to move through the entire software development process. (e.g., from code review to deployment).

4. Security metrics

With the rise of DevSecOps, tracking security performance is critical:

• Vulnerability detection rate:
  Measure how many vulnerabilities are identified and addressed during development versus post-release.
• Time-to-remediate vulnerabilities:
  Track how quickly your team resolves identified security issues.
• Compliance metrics:
  Monitor adherence to industry standards (e.g., ISO 27001, GDPR, or SOC 2).

Translating your DevOps goals into metrics

The choice of metrics should directly align to your DevOps goals. How to align them in practice?

Start with your DevOps goals

Begin by clearly defining your goals. Metrics should reflect progress toward these objectives. For example:

Goal: Accelerate software delivery
Track metrics like Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, and Cycle Time to measure speed and efficiency.

Goal: Improve system reliability
Focus on metrics like Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), Uptime, Incident Frequency, and Latency to ensure system stability and performance.

Goal: Foster cross-team collaboration
Monitor metrics like Change Failure Rate (to assess quality of handoffs) and feedback cycle times (e.g., time taken for code reviews or resolving support tickets).

Goal: Increase automation
Measure Test Automation Coverage, Manual Effort Reduction, and Deployment Automation Percentage to track progress toward a fully automated pipeline.

Goal: Promote security through DevSecOps
Track Vulnerability Detection Rate, Time-to-Remediate Vulnerabilities, and compliance adherence to ensure secure, efficient delivery.

Align metrics with your team’s maturity

Your metrics should evolve with your DevOps maturity level:

• For beginners: Focus on foundational metrics like Deployment Frequency, MTTR, and Test Automation Coverage to establish a baseline.
• For advanced teams: Add sophisticated metrics like Deployment Cost, Feedback Cycle Time, and Security Metrics to refine and optimize processes.

Avoid overwhelming teams with overly complex metrics early on—start small and build from there.

Prioritize actionable metrics

Only choose metrics that:

Drive behavior: Metrics should encourage teams to improve specific processes. For example, measuring Change Failure Rate incentivizes better testing and collaboration.

Provide insight: Metrics must reveal actionable insights. If a metric doesn’t guide decisions or changes, it’s not worth tracking.

Are easy to measure: Use tools like Grafana, Datadog, or Splunk to automate metric collection and avoid manual overhead.some text

Misalignment between business and DevOps objectives – causes and challenges

Misaligned priorities often mean delayed projects and wasted resources. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

When the connection between business and technology teams is fragmented, development efforts risk diverging from core business objectives, leading to inefficiencies, extended timelines, and products that fail to meet evolving customer expectations. - "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals" report by Brainhub

On top of that, an organization may suffer from delayed time-to-market, reduced ROI on technology investments, and weakening the overall ability to outperform market competitors, innovate, and grow. It just wastes its potential and much of the effort is in vain.

There are many reasons for such misalignment, with ineffective communication on priorities and progress topping the list. Communication should be clear, consistent, and continuous – every day and in every email or presentation. It must underpin every aspect of the company’s culture and be in place not only during weekly meetings. Answers to every question should be provided promptly to eliminate unnecessary doubts. Or waste.

Also, role definitions should be well-structured.

<span class="colorbox1" es-test-element="box1"><p> If you want to learn more about aligning IT goals with business ones, download the newest Brainhub’s export report on the issue: "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals". It’s the easiest way to learn how to identify your organization’s key objectives and map DevOps practices to achieve them.</p></span>

DevOps goals – how to reach them

Frameworks: OKRs and NCTs

Frameworks for defining DevOps goals that align with business priorities that may turn out to be especially helpful include OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and NCTs (Narrative, Context, Tasks). They help teams track progress against business metrics and evaluate new features, balancing impact with feasibility. The bottom line is delivering software that meets strategic objectives and, at the same time, is customer-centered.

The role of automation

What greatly increases the chances for success in the case of achieving DevOps goals, is automation. It can enhance virtually all phases of the process, including testing, deployment, and monitoring. For instance, automated monitoring – which covers automated alerts – plays a pivotal role in swift and effective incident management, detecting issues early, and reducing downtime.

Of course, it’s automated testing that’s dubbed the essential DevOps practice. Manual error reduction, improving lead time, and overall software delivery excellence it provides are definitely worth fighting for, but, very often, it doesn’t come without serious drawbacks. The list of possible challenges is quite long and may cover, for example, team resistance, difficulties with legacy systems integration, and high upfront costs. 

Gathering requirements

In the purpose of aligning business and DevOps objectives, it’s essential to use the right techniques for fostering collaboration between development, operations, and business teams.

For instance, the effective business requirement-gathering techniques include:

• user story mapping,
• workshops,
• domain storytelling,
• event storming,
• context mapping.

User-centered and purpose-driven techniques that serve long-term business goals are currently trending. Of course, there are more tools and practices that may be useful in bridging the gap, e.g., value stream mapping, and continuous feedback loops.

Shifting a DevOps mindset

Of course, mastering tools and techniques is not enough to make the change well-rooted, all-encompassing, and truly impactful. What’s essential, is the cultural alignment of all the people involved in the process, overcoming resistance and fostering a DevOps mindset across teams.

A DevOps mindset definitely needs to be enhanced – and promoting open communication and consistent feedback channels is essential, just like cross-functional collaboration. Transparency in all team interactions is important but so is order. Structured frameworks and performance metrics make it all clear for everyone and let every person involved be on the same page.

Aligning business and DevOps objectives – key takeaways

Business and software development should be aligned on every single stage – from top to bottom – to make sure that technical execution consistently meets business goals. These days, aligning DevOps goals with overarching business objectives is simply a must.

The drive for digital transformation is no longer optional but essential for organizations aiming to maintain a competitive edge. However, despite the clear imperative, success in digital transformation remains elusive for many; according to McKinsey, nearly 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve their intended outcomes. Conversely, research highlights that companies investing in a comprehensive portfolio of transformation initiatives often experience higher success rates. Strategic investments in building digital solutions, automating internal processes, and enhancing customer experiences can deliver substantial value, but only if they are closely aligned with the organization’s broader business vision. - "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals" report by Brainhub

Strategic alignment between business, development, and operations teams simply means ensuring that business, development, and operational efforts are all focused on common goals. The bottom line of such synergy is increased agility, competitiveness, and delivering real value to customers.