How to Start Your DevOps Journey by Building a Culture, Not Just Implementing Tools
Forget the endless tool comparisons and jargon. The real challenge—and opportunity—is cultivating cross-team trust and accountability to make DevOps work. Tools follow culture, not the other way around.
If you’re new to DevOps, it’s tempting to dive headfirst into exploring all the exciting tools—Jenkins, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, and a hundred others promising to streamline deployment and automation. But here’s the truth: without a strong foundation of culture, collaboration, and shared ownership, no amount of tooling will get your organization to true DevOps success.
Why Culture Comes First in DevOps
DevOps is more than technology; it’s a mindset shift. It breaks down silos between development and operations teams and encourages continuous feedback, transparency, and rapid iteration. Organizations that focus only on tooling often run into roadblocks like lack of communication, unclear responsibilities, or resistance to change.
Think of tools as accelerators—they speed up processes already established by collaboration and trust. If those fundamentals aren’t in place, the tools just automate dysfunction.
How to Start Your DevOps Journey: Practical Steps to Build Culture
1. Foster Cross-Team Communication
- Start with regular joint meetings between devs and ops: Schedule weekly or biweekly syncs where both teams share updates on projects, incidents, or upcoming deployments.
- Create shared channels for communication: Platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams work well for breaking down barriers. Consider dedicated channels for deployment discussions or incident response.
Example: At one company I advised, setting up a "Deployment Team" Slack channel where developers posted their deployment schedules helped ops anticipate workload and better support the process. Over time, this transparency decreased last-minute firefighting.
2. Define Shared Goals Aligned with Business Outcomes
- Move away from isolated KPIs. Instead of measuring developers by features completed or operations by uptime alone, set combined goals such as “reduce lead time for changes” or “improve mean time to recovery.”
- Hold joint retrospectives after major releases where both teams discuss what went well and what didn’t.
Example: One client replaced separate monthly reports with a joint "Production Stability & Feature Velocity" dashboard that both teams reviewed. This shifted focus from blaming segments towards collective problem-solving.
3. Encourage Shared Responsibility & Accountability
- Avoid “throw it over the wall” mentality where devs build code then hand it off to ops.
- Promote “you build it, you run it” philosophy where developers also monitor their services in production.
Consider having developers alerted for production incidents or requiring them to participate in on-call rotations.
Example: A startup implemented developer involvement in monitoring via tools like Prometheus and PagerDuty; this boosted ownership as devs learned firsthand the impact of their code in production.
4. Invest in Continuous Learning Together
- Promote cross-training sessions where operations teach devs about infrastructure concerns and vice versa.
- Organize workshops on CI/CD principles focusing on shared challenges rather than just tool usage.
This helps build empathy between teams—developers understand stability needs; ops gain insight into agile deployments.
5. Start Small with Incremental Automation
Once you’ve built trust and aligned goals:
- Select a small project or pipeline to automate collaboratively.
- Use automation as an enabler—not a silver bullet—to reduce manual toil.
Example: A team began automating alerts acknowledgment workflows first before moving on to automated provisioning—focusing on quick wins improved team confidence and buy-in.
Wrapping Up: Culture Enables Tools To Thrive
Your DevOps journey starts not by installing another platform but by transforming how people work together. Emphasize transparency, shared responsibility, frequent communication, learning together—and only then leverage tooling strategically as an accelerator for these cultural shifts.
Remember: tools follow culture—not the other way around.
If you nurture this cultural foundation first, your automation efforts will be more sustainable and your innovation more agile.
Ready to take the first step? Start scheduling that dev-ops catch-up meeting today! It might just be the easiest—and most valuable—deployment you make all week.