After ten years of DevOps, most people think the pipeline starts at the product backlog. But what happens before items get on the backlog? That upstream territory – sales, marketing, finance, procurement, HR – operates with the same collaboration patterns and friction points we spent a decade addressing between dev and ops.
Working in a startup, I discovered that sales has its own pipeline that looks exactly like a Kanban board: new lead, meeting, proposal, done. Sales people are on call all the time. They learned that speed of response directly increases close rates – the same feedback loop principle we preach in IT. They are mind readers trying to interpret what customers actually want, just like developers trying to decode unclear specs. Going into sales meetings as the technical person helped enormously – asking both functional and technical questions early in the process improved our estimates and reduced surprises downstream.
The estimation problem hits sales even harder than development. Selling on value rather than cost markup requires a different mindset. The uncertainty of project scoping shows up before the sale is even closed. We moved to sprint-based contracts focused on delivering the most valuable thing first, which gave us flexibility when priorities shifted. The constant pressure from sales to make things simpler and cheaper actually improved our architecture – constraints drive innovation.
Marketing has its own pipeline, automation workflows, and metrics. They may have invented metrics before IT did – heat maps, click tracking, conversion funnels. IT can help marketing enormously by exposing company culture online (like Cloudflare’s blog posts that read like internal memos), providing technical depth for documentation that helps sell to customers’ IT departments, and getting customers on Slack early for rapid feedback. They came for the features but stayed for the support.
Finance, procurement, and HR complete the picture. Beyond budgeting advocates incremental funding aligned to value streams rather than departments. Agile procurement replaces six-month spreadsheet evaluations with proof-of-concept experiments. HR sets the cultural standards that determine how your DevOps pipeline actually operates – hiring practices, work-life balance policies, mob programming approval. Shopify killed periodic calendar meetings; Microsoft experimented with three-day weekends. These HR decisions shape the environment where DevOps happens.
The map from DevOps roles to business departments writes itself: developers are marketing (always sharing, feature-eager), project managers are sales (cost-conscious, timeline-driven), HR is coaching, ops is legal (nobody talks to them unless there is a problem), and finance is testing (they verify whether the company will survive). If your DevOps pipeline works well enough, the next bottleneck is almost certainly upstream.
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