How DevOps Can Make Product Thinking Come Alive

Product thinking is a transformative mindset that keeps the company one step ahead of its customers. It gives the company the vision to see where the customers would want to go next with the product.

However, like all complicated processes, this approach is more than just a buzzword. It translates to a working and thinking culture that is far more nuanced and evolving than a simple engineering mindset. It doesn’t matter whether the product development team is in-house or offshore. It is the product-thinking mindset that matters.

So, how does one develop a process or a rubric for continuous delivery? How do we adopt or transmit this mindset to the offshore development team? To achieve this gargantuan feat, DevOps could very well be the silver bullet.

Why DevOps could be the key 

Project management approach views a product in terms of a delivery deadline. Product thinking, on the other hand, embraces a product’s entire lifecycle. It is DevOps that help achieve this seemingly elusive goal.

DevOps is more than just a methodology. It includes people, tools, culture, and processes, fuelled by automation and is marked by continuous collaboration and delivery.

With DevOps at the helm, you can run a variety of tests on complex products and services, both manual and automated, and it can be done overnight.There is a system or a rubric that is easily transmitted to an offshore team.

This article by Isaac Sacolick underpins the problem-solving charm that is at the heart of DevOps. It balances the business demands to improve the usability of applications with operational responsibilities.

Read more: Why businesses should adopt DevOps?

How can we leverage offshore teams using DevOps? 

In a traditional approach, documentation is sent to offshore developers to support coding and local testing on completion of early analysis and design. The stakeholders analyse the code that comes back.

DevOps demands the exact opposite. It requires continuous collaborations between teams and shorter development cycles called ‘sprints.’ With geographical divides, it is hard to work more collaboratively and instinctively.

Changing Mindset 

The first step, in implementing product thinking with an offshore development team, is to change their development mindset. You need to change the antiquated thought process of just handing off work to another team and going on to another ‘project.’

Responsible Automation 

According to Vinay Venkatesh, when using DevOps to elevate an offshore team’s contribution, the idea is not just to be satisfied with automation. Dependencies on other software services and monolithic systems make it impossible to integrate all applications. So it is important that the program be designed keeping the end-to-end enterprise delivery in focus.

Other strategies involve designing consistent, cutting edge and reflexive communication channels among teams across the board. A transition document, an automated one, can help in tracking and monitoring the critical aspects of work. With such automation, the gap between the onshore and remote team is bridged, pretty well!

Team Integration 

The offshore team should be a team integrated with the existing local team. It is essential to have more intuitive and strategic hiring processes when it comes to offshore teams. The culture of DevOps – cross-functional collaborations, thinking beyond timelines, continuous improvement, and rapid delivery – should be communicated and transferred to the offshore team.

In conclusion, DevOps is a methodology and mindset that has superb and adaptive tools. However, these tools amount to nothing if the product development team, whether in-house or offshore, doesn’t understand the culture, proficiency, and vision that is needed to embrace the product thinking mindset.

Read more : Why You Need a Product Thinking Development Team