Imagine if your dev, ops, business and product teams operated as a single well-oiled machine. Where every technology project unlocked its full revenue potential. And seamless collaboration shaved months off your launch cycles.
This reality exists for companies pioneering an emerging discipline called BizDevOps. Keep reading as an insider tech guru shares everything you need to know to transform to this next-generation operating model.
An Executive Overview of BizDevOps
BizDevOps synthesizes skills across business leadership, software development and IT operations. It breaks down functional silos that slow delivery and cause misalignment. Cross-departmental teams instead own end-to-end product outcomes.
This amplifies strategy execution, user experience and speed-to-market. Firms reorienting around BizDevOps best practices often gain:
20%+ faster delivery cycles
30-50% more productive engineers
15-25% expanded revenue from enhanced solutions
50-90% improved employee retention via engaging culture
Transforming requires careful change management. But the performance lift is steep for those seizing the opportunity. Let‘s explore how leading organizations are making this shift.
What Sets BizDevOps Apart from Previous Collaboration Efforts?
DevOps introduced badly needed bonding between developer and operational teams. Butdevs still coded in a vacuum, launching solutions not optimized for business priorities.
Agile provided welcome flexibility after rigid waterfall development models. But Scrum ceremonies still centered on execution rather than strategic alignment.
BizDevOps goes further – rallying the whole company to unify around customer needs. Product, marketing, finance and other groups feed business context straight into daily software planning. Devs gain line-of-sight linking code commits to revenue growth and profitability…
Real Companies Finding Real Results with BizDevOps
Beyond the hype, actual organizations large and small are pioneering BizDevOps and registering stellar gains:
33% increase in deal conversion – Marketing and sales platform ClearBit attributes a third more sales wins to BizDevOps improving lead targeting with custom intent data.
8 month shrink in release cycles – Digital bank Monzo halved its already swift 16 month launch timeline via amplified collaboration between bankers, designers and engineers.
20% lift in customer lifetime value – Insurer Lemonade‘s beyond-DevOps approach delivers features matching consumer needs for a fifth higher member retention.
"BizDevOps is essential to stay competitive when moving at today‘s speed…" explains Johanna Rothman, Principal Consultant of Rothman Consulting Group.
These examples showcase why BizDevOps is becoming mandatory for any digital business aiming to keep pace with ever-rising customer expectations.
Core Principles for Developing a Thriving BizDevOps Environment
While tactics vary across verticals, maturing BizDevOps orgs often cultivate several defining traits:
Cross-Departmental Team Charter
- Defines shared mission, responsibilities, goals advancing end-to-end ownership
Visible Visual Workflows
- Maps all hand-offs, decisions, feedback loops between groups
Choice of Adaptable Technologies
- Infrastructure like microservices and cloud foster change
Lightweight Governance Model
- Code reviews, audits, risk assessments applied judiciously to empower teams
Short Feedback Loops With Real Users
- Continuous delivery to tap direct consumer input, pivot quickly
Culture embracing Continuous Experimentation
- Rewards smart risks that provoke learning, even if unsuccessful
These tenets enable cooperative priorities, transparency, empowerment and skill-building to flourish across disparate contributors.
Now let‘s walk through what BizDevOps looks like in practice across the product lifecycle…
Flowing Through the BizDevOps Workflow
A mature implementation coordinates multiple personnel groups spanning activities from strategic planning to system decommissioning. While specifics differ across companies, high-level BizDevOps sequencing often includes:
1. Craft Business Case
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Marketing bases initial opportunity hypothesis on customer interviews, data analysis
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Finance builds revenue and cost models, payback period expectations
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Senior stakeholders greenlight which ideas advance
2. Detail Market Requirements
- Product managers synthesize findings into must-have feature backlogs
- User experience designers prototype key interactions
- Security, compliance review needs addressed
3. Implement Solution
- Agile squads build, test and deploy working software
- QA verifies quality sufficient for exposure to users
- Infosec checks firewall policies, access rules updated
4. Review Operational Readiness
- Operations tunes monitoring, on-call escalations pre-launch
- Support prepares help documentation, readies agents
- Executives confirm metrics and milestones for go-live
5. Release & Iterate
- Incremental features made accessible per release train cadence
- Product routinely solicits and incorporates user feedback
- Teams measure outcomes, identify continuous improvements
This end-to-end synchronization – from upfront planning to downstream optimization – distinguishes how BizDevOps orgs operate.
Next let‘s spotlight tools and techniques to enable this cross-group harmony.
BizDevOps Enabling Technologies
Specialized software across several categories streamlines connecting historically disjointed teams:
Idea Management
- Crowdsources innovations from staff systemwide
Example: Spigit, BrightIdea
Design Collaboration
- Allows interactive mockup sharing for user research
Example: Figma, Miro
Value Stream Mapping
- Models complex workflows, waste and cycle times
Example: Trello, Lucidchart
Cross-team ChatOps
- Enables real-time chat automation across departments
Example: Teams, Slack
Project/Product Roadmapping
- Aligns business priorities to development capacity
Example: Craft, Aha!
DevOps Release Orchestration
- Automates coding, testing and infrastructure for faster build/deploy
Example: Octopus Deploy, Harness
Customer Feedback Management
- Ingests and analyzes user data to guide requirements
Example: ProductBoard, UserVoice
The above technologies advance visibility, traceability and rhythm across the end-to-end product chain. They enable Plan of Record and Work in Progress transparency at each process stage.
Now let‘s explore some master strategies for launching BizDevOps inside your own company…
A Proven Implementation Game Plan for Rolling Out BizDevOps
Evolving from siloed projects towards integrated BizDevOps has four key phases:
1. Make the Case
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Pinpoint current gaps – Use data to show release bottlenecks, reflect strategy gaps missed by lack of collaboration.
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Define future vision – Paint a picture of seamless cooperation fueling better financial results and culture.
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Secure executive sponsor – Involve influential leaders to champion the change.
2. Pilot Integrated Teams
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Socialize idea with potential participants across IT, product, business groups – Volunteer squads more adaptable.
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Select pilot application – Good first targets have learnings transferable to other systems, visible executive stakeholders.
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Staff team – Blend complementary skills including software, UX, business analysts.
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Train together in practices like human-centered design, agile, shared outcomes.
3. Experiment and Show Value
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Start small, deliver continuously – Build trust through successive working software releases revealing capability.
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Allow some policy flexibility – Bend restrictive rules blocking productivity, gather data on issues for later governance fixes.
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Publicize wins – Celebrate faster cycle times, enhanced functionality, happier customers.
4. Spread to Other Areas
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Transition more teams onto BizDevOps toolchain – Leverage what pilot groups learned to accelerate sophistication.
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Update standards – Reshape org policies around intake, compliance, testing to better suit integrated work.
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Refine change agents – Grow pilot participants into internal coaches able to guide peers through transformation.
This roadmap centers on starting narrowly, demonstrating impact, and expanding. It allows organic adoption and adjustment into existing culture vs. abrupt, wholesale changes.
Now let‘s examine some common hurdles you may face adopting BizDevOps, and how leading organizations overcome them.
Overcoming Key BizDevOps Adoption Challenges
While delivering compelling benefits, pivoting to BizDevOps provokes expected resistance and growing pains, such as:
"We‘ve always done it this other way" – People reject unfamiliar techniques counter to stable habits.
- Mitigation: Prove value in small doses beforeasking for broad commitment to new practices.
”Our metrics aren’t aligned for shared goals” – Teams continue chasing outcomes benefiting their narrow domain.
- Mitigation: Define qualitative and quantitative KPIs promoting end-to-end ownership for collective business results.*
"Central IT bottlenecking release velocity" – Backend infrastructure/security gates strangle agile feature delivery
- Mitigation: Platform teams adopt their own "Developer Experience" DevOps model to speed compliant change across the enterprise.*
”Leadership only rewards individual performance” – Lack of collaboration incentives perpetuates lone hero culture.
Mitigation: Evolve recognition and promotions to highlight cross-group contributions.
"We just don‘t understand each other‘s roles" – Groups like marketing, engineering speak different “languages”
Mitigation: Rotate staff across projects for exposure to how peer groups operate. Have lunch discussions exploring priorities.
With care and persistence, these obstacles gradually give way to intermixed skills, currency on shared objectives, empathy and mutually understood vocabulary.
Now let’s debrief some leading industry experts on their real-world lessons building mature BizDevOps orgs…
Ask The Experts: Hard-Earned Insights From BizDevOps Consultants
We discussed accelerating technology results by bridging business, user and technologist perspectives with two renowned BizDevOps specialists:
John Willis – VP Ecosystem Development, Harness
"The biggest ‘ah-ha moment’ for skeptics is when they directly engage external users for the first time…seeing how product priorities totally realign from internal assumptions."
Cornelia Davis – CTO, WeWork
"You need to soak test new integrated team policies and standards iteratively before institutionalizing. Implementation guides collaboration – phase locking specs too early creates friction."
Their guidance underscores that getting hands-on with actual consumers – while allowing practices to emerge organically through trials – crystallizes the immense latent potential from BizDevOps.
Pulling all this together, let‘s reflect on key takeaways you can enact starting today to pave your organization‘s BizDevOps journey.
8 Impactful First Steps Toward Unlocking BizDevOps
While modernizing engrained cultures requires steady commitment, you can embark immediately with:
1. Recruit executive allies – Make the revenue growth case to senior leaders able to fund a pilot.
2. Emphasize “why” over “how” – Connect BizDevOps to financial performance and competitiveness before process.
3. Build your bench – Train willing change agents in critical skills like systems thinking, value stream mapping, Champion-Challenger.
4. Start targeted trials – Prove value in measured doses vs. abrupt organization-wide push.
5. Incentivize shared metrics – Tie compensation and promotions to cross-group accomplishments.
6. Increase platform flexibility – Position infrastructure to empower teams through faster change.
7. Address maturity build-by-build – Let capabilities emerge iteratively from agile feature delivery.
8. Celebrate shared wins frequently – Recognize examples of self-organization and joint outcomes.
….Are you ready to commence your own BizDevOps journey? The business landscape continues accelerating exponentially. Combined might from your technical and commercial experts makes the difference in thriving amid unrelenting disruption.
