Building stronger DevOps teams through learning

“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.”

— Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project

Are your DevOps teams improving with each sprint—or just repeating the same motions faster?

For engineering and technology leaders, the challenge today isn’t just accelerating delivery—it’s building teams that can evolve in real time. In a landscape of shifting platforms, growing complexity, and constant change, the most resilient teams aren’t the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones who learn the fastest.

DevOps teams don’t just need to move quickly. They need to get better at how they move. And that starts with how leaders design the culture, priorities, and day-to-day rhythms of their teams.

DevOps isn’t a one-time transformation. It’s an ongoing evolution of culture, practice, and mindset. Every sprint, deploy, and incident response is an opportunity to learn about what broke and how the team can improve.

Because of this, the highest-performing teams are learning organizations. They reflect through retrospectives and postmortems. They experiment and share insights. They adopt new tools and approaches because they’re empowered to explore. None of this happens without leaders who prioritize learning over mere delivery.

Despite good intentions, many organizations struggle to support continuous learning in practice. There are often a few reasons for this: 

• Limited time forces teams to prioritize output over reflection, leaving no space to evaluate or evolve. 
• A deeply ingrained hero culture tends to reward individuals who swoop in to fix urgent issues, rather than those who work quietly to improve systems long term. 
• The fear of failure discourages experimentation and causes teams to avoid risk—even when improvement depends on it. 

Without meaningful feedback loops, blind spots grow, bottlenecks persist, and small issues snowball into structural problems. These dynamics don’t just hinder progress—they trap teams in reactive cycles where growth is stalled, innovation becomes risky, and burnout takes hold. 

Breaking these cycles requires deliberate action.

“Improving daily work” doesn’t happen by accident—it happens by design. As a leader, you have the greatest influence over whether learning is embedded in team culture or sidelined in favor of short-term output.

Begin by treating learning as a priority, not a perk. High-performing teams aren't expected to squeeze upskilling into leftover time. Instead, they’re given the space and support to invest in it regularly. 

When leaders block time for knowledge sharing, celebrate small experiments, or allocate budget for courses and certifications, they send a clear message: Learning is part of the job.

Equally important is the intentional integration of feedback into daily work. Whether through code reviews, incident debriefs, or sprint retrospectives, continuous feedback ensures learning isn’t confined to the occasional offsite or postmortem. It becomes habitual—part of the team’s rhythm. And when teams can reflect on how they work, not just what they produce, they improve in meaningful ways.

Leadership also means modeling learning personally. The most effective leaders show curiosity, admit what they’re still figuring out, and ask questions rather than always providing answers. This vulnerability sets the tone for a learning culture by demonstrating that growth isn’t just encouraged—it’s expected at every level.

Read more: Learning & development for tech leadership: Key skills to build

Finally, leaders must create safe-to-fail environments where experimentation is welcomed and mistakes are mined for insight, not punishment. By piloting small changes, embracing iteration, and framing failure as feedback, leaders enable their teams to adapt and evolve without fear.

This is Gene Kim’s core message—and its relevance will only grow in today’s evolving environments.

When teams make learning a regular part of how they operate, they don’t just get smarter—they get stronger, faster, and more resilient. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• They recover from incidents faster. Teams that learn continuously analyze failures, conduct blameless postmortems, and identify systemic fixes, not just surface-level patches. As a result, when something breaks, they don’t scramble—they respond with confidence, using prior knowledge and a shared understanding of the system to resolve issues quickly and prevent them from reoccurring.
• They ship more reliably. A learning culture emphasizes early feedback, continuous integration, and cross-functional collaboration. These habits reduce friction, expose risks earlier, and improve quality. When teams reflect on what slows them down or breaks their flow—and act on those insights—they ship with more consistency and fewer surprises.
• They reduce operational pain. High-performing DevOps teams don’t just learn from outages—they learn from toil. They spot repetitive, manual tasks and automate them. They refine runbooks, eliminate alert fatigue, and simplify overly complex deployments. The result is a more stable, sustainable working environment with fewer reactive cycles.
• They retain top talent. People don’t stay where they feel stagnant—they stay where they grow. When leaders invest in learning, they signal that growth is not just allowed—it’s expected and supported. Team members feel trusted, challenged, and engaged, which fuels retention and deeper ownership of outcomes.

These aren’t soft benefits—they’re operational outcomes. And they stem directly from the choice to treat learning not as a side project, but as core infrastructure.

As a DevOps leader, you’re not just delivering software. You’re shaping the systems and behaviors that determine whether your team thrives or survives.

Improving daily work is your most strategic act.

What part of your team’s daily work is overdue for improvement?

Related reading: Learn more about the DevOps workflow and how to streamline software development.