CEOs don’t care about your infra project: Why they should and how to make them - Cat Morris

Infrastructure, networking or “backend” teams have been around for a long time in most organizations. Despite the shift to platform or SRE teams with a bunch of promises (“speeding up delivery” or “more stability”), there is often such an unending operational load that means they can’t see those promises through to outcomes. Then management asks the question: why should I invest more in this team? The CTO or head of engineering fights the platform team’s corner but the focus typically ends up somewhere else. Over the past two years, I’ve worked with a bunch of infrastructure teams who were all trying to get more investment and interest in what they were doing. I made a lot of mistakes (some of which I’ll share!) but the big success was changing the perception of what those teams were doing. I’ll share how we made the highly repetitive toil work of those teams visible and shifted the narrative on what value they could really be adding to the whole business using the very simple sounding value-based goals and thin slicing (spoiler: it wasn’t very simple!)
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