Today's world is a DevOps one, and as a Product Manager that means you're part of the dev team. As teams transition from building products to running services, you must adapt your role as teams embrace DevOps and create dedicated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. Consider these questions: What's your role during an incident? How do you communicate to customers? Are you incorporating reliability metrics into your product roadmap? The good news is, you can contribute to running services just as much as building products. In this talk, learn how Product Managers on the JIRA team contribute to incident management and review, support a green build culture, plan for reliability, and roll out features and experiments in a services-first world. Dave Meyer, Senior Product Manager, Atlassian

1. A Product Manager’s Place
In a DevOps World
DAVE MEYER | SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER | ATLASSIAN | @D_MEYER

2. What does a product
manager do?
BIG HAIRY QUESTION

4. Tech. Sgt. Brad Fallin, U.S. Air Force; Source (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F-15C.jpg)

5. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); Source (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:STSCPanel.jpg)

6. Gus Pasquarella; Source (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hindenburg_burning,_1937.jpg)

7. What does a product
manager care about?
BIG HAIRY QUESTION #2

8. Looking good
BIG HAIRY QUESTION #2
Customers

9. How do you
evolve?

10. Lasse Fuss; Source (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lufthansa_A380_D-AIMA-1.jpg)

11. DevOps
Collaboration between dev
and IT
SRE
Site Reliability Engineering
DevOps vs SRE

12. BEN TRAYNOR, GOOGLE
SRE is what happens when a
software engineer is tasked
with operations
“Keys to SRE”

13. All product teams are ops teams now

14. Keep the
thing
running
SHIP FEATURES
PM DEV TEAM
GET FEEDBACK
SHIP MORE FEATURES
(ship features)

15. (Re)align your priorities
Source (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KC-97G_Illinois_ANG_refueling_F-100C_DC_ANG_1964.jpg)

16. Your tactics
Reliability as a feature
Support the culture
Managing incidents

17. You own features all the
way to release, then
past release, then
forever.
Nessy-Pic; Source (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caernarfon_Castle_Walls.jpg)

18. If you can’t measure it, you
can’t improve it it’s probably
broken and your customers
are tweeting about it.

19. Error rates
Is there a new
problem in the
system?
What dev teams measure in production
Performance
Is the system running
at the same speed?
Behavior
Are the things we
expect users to do
happening?

20. Behavior
Are the things we
expect users to do
happening?
Error rates
Is there a new
problem in the
system?
Performance
Is the system running
at the same speed?
Alerting
Do you know about
it?
What dev teams measure in production

24. Something bad
403 errors in project creation have
spiked!

27. Rewiring your brain

28. React in minutes
MTTR is the key to happy customers
Wait for support
Support response time is the key to
happy customers

29. RELIABILITY AS A FEATURE: PERFORMANCE
How Apdex
changed
JIRA Cloud

30. What is Apdex?
GOOD REQUESTS 0.5(OK REQUESTS)
TOTAL REQUESTS
0 - 1

31. RUF breakdown 🐶
0
0.125
0.25
0.375
0.5
January 15 Feb Mar Apr May Jun July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan 16
33.8%
31.3% 31.1%
32.8%
30.3% 31.5%
34.5% 33.5% 32.8%
28.8%
19.2%
16.7% 16.8%
41.7% 41% 41.8%
43.7%
40%
43.9% 43.1% 42.1%
43.7%
39.7%
43.1% 43.9% 42.8%
20.3%
21.8% 21%
19.5% 20.4% 19.5%
18%
20%
15.8% 15.4%
9.5% 8.1% 7.9%
Reliability Usability Functionality

32. Performance Mentions vs Apdex
0
0.175
0.35
0.525
0.7
4.5%
9%
13.5%
18%
January 15 Feb Mar Apr May Jun July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan 16
% Mention Apdex

33. JIRA Cloud performance is
now reasonable instead of
feeling like grandmother’s
old laptop.
JIRA CLOUD CUSTOMER

34. NPS ++
RELIABILITY AS A FEATURE: PERFORMANCE

35. RELIABILITY AS A FEATURE
Balancing your
roadmap

36. Your tactics
Reliability as a feature
Support the culture
Managing incidents

37. Release
Roll-out
End-to-end involvement
Post-release
Incident management
Pre-release
Operational readiness

38. Have a checklist
Processes build confidence
Pair with an expert
Discuss impact of features on performance and
error rates with SRE
Document your decisions
Make sure nobody is in the dark
Are you
ready to
release?

39. Operational
Readiness: Credo
We automatically clone
this template for every
new service at
Atlassian.

41. We made PMs become service
owners, otherwise they just pay
lip service to operational
excellence.
PAUL SLADE, ATLASSIAN IDENTITY HEAD OF ENGINEERING

42. Tomorrow
Checklist-zero
Today
Checklists are better than prayers

43. Feature flags
Separating “deploying the code” from
“reeleasing the change”
Allow quick iteration
Encourage PMs to plan iterative rollouts

47. Have a checklist
Processes build confidence
Pair with an expert
Discuss impact of features on performance and
error rates with SRE
Document your decisions
Make sure nobody is in the dark
Are you
ready to
release?

48. Have a checklist
Processes build confidence
Pair with an expert
Discuss impact of features on performance and
error rates with SRE
Document your decisions
Make sure nobody is in the dark
Are you
ready to
release?

50. go.atlassian.com/daci

51. Your tactics
Reliability as a feature
Support the culture
Managing incidents

52. An event which causes
disruption to or a reduction in
the quality of services and
customer productivity.
WHAT IS AN INCIDENT?

53. If it affects customers, it’s
your problem.
WHY DO YOU CARE?

55. Know your role.
INCIDENT MANAGEMENT FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS

58. Your job is
not to fix it.
You own the
customer
relationship.

59. Assess
Help dev and SRE
understand impact
Communicate
Own customer
communications
A PM during an incident

65. Responsible
Even when it’s not
your fault, it’s your
fault.
Clear
No BS
Active
What are you doing
about it?
Empathetic
Respect the
customer
Great customer communication

66. Preventing
the next one

68. What a successful
PIR looks like

69. Summary
Tell me what happened.
Root cause
Tell me exactly why it
happened.
Actions
Tell me how you’re going to
make sure it doesn’t happen
again.
What a successful PIR looks like

70. “Business value”
is so much more
than features
THE PM IN THE DEVOPS WORLD

71. DAVE MEYER | SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER | ATLASSIAN | @D_MEYER
🎊Thanks🎊