Marcel Britsch
12 - 13 March 2025 | Alte Kaserne Winterthur
Digital consultant, product manager and business analyst
Marcel Britsch is an independent Digital Consultant, Product Owner and Agile Transformation specialist. Born in Germany, he has been living and working in London for over 20 years. He has worked with creatively and technically focused agencies and clients across retail, conservation, automotive, finance, healthcare and energy.
He helps organisations build solid products and services in a sustainable way by facilitation, pairing, coaching or hands-on product management.
He believes that project success is strongly linked to happy teams, value-focused decision- making and fast feedback cycles. He is passionate about finding the best tools and techniques to optimise team culture, ways of working and solution design. He considers projects that follow classic waterfall / big-design-up-front practices to be too likely doomed to go anywhere near them, but loves to help organisations build products and transform in incremental evolutionary fashion.
Outside of work he is interested in SciFi and comic books, Theravada Buddhist meditation and number theory.
He is a regular speaker at conferences, blogs at www.thedigitalbusinessanalyst.com, co-hosts the https://www.theburnup.com podcast about 'all things agile', and can be found at https://www.beautifulabstraction.com.
Ignite
How I Started Worrying and Stopped Loving DevOps
In this cautionary tale, I’ll share three real-world product-building experiences, mapping my journey as a product manager from a DevOps enthusiast to a wary cynic. I’ll share examples of how infrastructure can drift into ‘purgatory’: pipelines that are ‘never done,’ painfully complex to maintain, or beautifully engineered yet devoid of applications to support. My goal is to highlight the missteps I encountered, so future teams might avoid these traps and sidestep the costly pursuit of infrastructure perfection that can derail real progress.
how the talk will unfold
Introduction: The Allure of DevOps
To bring us onto the same page - and this should not be controversial - I’ll share my attitude towards DevOps, where I see it being valuable and beneficial when building products and services.
Pitfalls: When Reality meets Ideology
Drawing on my personal experience I will share a number of examples, where despite best intentions, our DevOps endeavours, descended into, at best waste and pain, at worst total dysfunction. I will touch on aspects such as technology ‘greed’, over-engineering, gold-plating, premature optimisation, strategic misalignment and others, and show how, from excitement and enthusiasm about DevOps users, stakeholders and ‘the business’ can easily become disillusioned, cynical and frustrated.
Conclusion: The moral of the tale, advice for the real world
I will conclude with guiding principles to avoid falling into the same traps.
What participants will take away
An awareness of the important to adopt a critical view on
- DevOps (and other) technical decisions
- A list of potential pitfalls and challenges
- Actionable guidance and suggestions on how to manage these tensions, risks and challenges to avoid falling into the same traps
- An understanding that infrastructure is an important - but nevertheless - means to an end, that needs to serve a greater purpose
How I Started Worrying and Stopped Loving DevOps