For example, a product manager might not have visibility into the trials and tribulations within the typical operations role. Reviewing Chapter 3, “Operate”, can provide greater insight into the key components of this role and into how they can work better together.

Organizations are often very different from one another. As authors, we’ve done our best to align the content within this book to the majority of organizations, but as always, the complexities of individual organizations, verticals, and even teams can often result in varying levels of ease and friction around concepts within this book.

Navigating and Using This Book

This book mainly concerns the operations side of software delivery. We, the authoring team, have structured it into four chapters focusing successively on the deploy, release, operate, and measure and experiment stages:

• In Chapter 1, “Deploy”, we’ll explain the characteristics of healthy deployment practices, which should minimize the time to go from local development to production, provide a platform from which you can easily visualize and manage what change is landing in production, and allow you to roll rapidly backward or forward as necessary. We’ll introduce the argument that smaller and more frequent deployments are better than larger, less frequent ones—especially when you can leverage development practices like feature flagging to mitigate risk. We’ll also look at deployment orchestration and discuss the relative merits of different deployment strategies.
• In Chapter 2, “Release”, we’ll explain how to leverage approaches like feature management to make release a separate step from deployment. We’ll cover use cases, including kill switches, progressive rollouts, progressive delegation, testing in production, and personalization. And we’ll discuss the personas, tools, and collaboration necessary to utilize these strategies.
• In Chapter 3, “Operate”, we’ll introduce the new activities that we see integrated software teams leveraging to understand and act on a system in operation. We’ll touch on incident management practices that we see being adopted to support continuous operation. Finally, we’ll explore the importance of personnel and how you organize teams.
• In continuous operation, measurement and experimentation are key functions of numerous roles working in concert. In Chapter 4, “Measure and Experiment”, we’ll cover A/B/n testing and product analytics, paying special attention to governance and clean data. We’ll also introduce the concept of release impact, which is distinct from optimization-focused experimentation.

While we have written this book as an end-to-end flow, it can also be used as a reference guide, with each section providing clarity, offering recommendations, and outlining pitfalls to avoid within each domain.