Why do you run?

During my time in Munich, I lived next to the river Isar. I started running - again. To stay healthy, yes, but mainly to clear my mind. After 20 minutes running, normally my mind starts to fly. That flying helps me to have a satisfying day. It's so easy. At least sometimes.

A friend of mine invited me to run together. At this time, she trained for her first marathon. On her schedule there were multiple different kinds of runs, short ones, long runs, fast sprints, some intervals. Sometimes they were fun. Not always. 

So we started to run together. On one of our 2 hour runs, I stopped suddenly. It was not my condition. I suddenly stopped, because I realized I lost my fun doing it. It was one of those moments, when everything got clear. I lost the reason why I’m running. I was not training for a marathon. My motivation was different. It was that good feeling of clearing my mind. Flying, how I call it.

I have seen the same loss of perspective and focus in my transformations. People are starting to transform to an Agile enterprise and implementing DevOps on a scale. These transformations are filled with endless tooling discussion. Filled with doubts about their decisions. Multi year transformations are like my 2 hours run alongside the river. 

“Why are we doing it?”. “We do it to automate everything - or not?”. “It's to increase productivity and reduce time to market - or?”. “It's so that we can deploy weekly”.

Yes! But, these are just the interim stages. We do it to create inspiring products. The product our customer wishes to have. It's not easy. We do it to have short iterations. We do A/B testing to figure out if the new feature works better. We want to raise the quality by better usability and less downtime. But for that we can not stop by measuring unit test coverage. We don't stop by measuring the deployment frequency. Lets link our intermediate objectives to our overall objective: our product optimization for our customer. To get the value of DevOps, we link our KPIs to the business value. Our customer is the reason why we are changing our work structure.  

We do DevOps to iterate faster, run experiments to optimize our product for our customer.