DevOps adoption remains uneven across the industry. As Jeff Sussna, founder and principal of Ingineering.IT, has observed: “There are some companies that are all in and making really comprehensive progress. In general though, I would say a majority of companies I see are sort of grappling with it bit by bit, trying to understand what it is and how to do it.”

What is clear is that managers play a central role in making DevOps work. “You are coaching, mentoring, guiding, incenting people—and being willing to experiment,” Sussna said. Below are five practical tips to help you become an effective DevOps manager.

1. Start Where You Are

You do not need a new job title or a reorganized reporting structure to begin leading with a DevOps mindset. According to Jennifer Davis, co-author of Effective DevOps and formerly a senior software engineer at Chef Software, enterprises should avoid creating a siloed “DevOps team.” Instead, every manager should embrace DevOps principles within their existing role.

The practical starting point: examine your team’s current workflows, identify bottlenecks that better collaboration could solve, and then talk to your team and to potential partners on adjacent teams. “Empower the team to be part of the change transformation,” Davis said.

Sussna reinforces this point: “It’s important to emphasize that at its heart, DevOps is not about org chart changes—it doesn’t mean everyone’s title changes or you report to one manager. It means that the nature of your relationships with all of the other managers and parts of the organization changes.”

2. Change Your Attitude Toward Failure

A common early mistake is expecting immediate, measurable results from a DevOps initiative. When a two-week experiment does not deliver obvious wins, some managers conclude the approach failed and abandon it. Sussna argues this is the wrong frame entirely: “You now have information, so it shouldn’t be treated as a failed project.”

DevOps transformation is not like deploying a new software tool. It operates on a deeper, human level—changing how people think, work, and relate to colleagues across the organization. “As a manager, you have to think about your team, or organization, as a service provider—not just a doer of things,” Sussna said. Treat early setbacks as learning opportunities and iterate from there.

3. Hone Your Collaboration Skills

DevOps is fundamentally about cross-functional collaboration. Bridget Kromhout, principal technologist at Cloud Foundry and a lead organizer of the DevOpsDays conference, notes that effective DevOps managers must be able to lead and align development, infrastructure, operations, security, testing, and product teams toward shared goals.

“Being a great manager means respecting the perspective of other teams while channeling your direct reports’ efforts towards the agreed-upon goals of the wider organization,” Kromhout said. Specific practices that support this include:

• Active listening during cross-team discussions
• Blameless postmortems that focus on systemic improvement rather than individual fault
• Building affinity—deliberate relationship-building across teams and communities

Davis emphasizes that the connections you build across an organization reduce communication barriers, shorten delivery cycles, and establish trust. “The connections that we build allow us to shorten the time that it takes for us to get work done, reduce communication barriers, and build trust based on regard,” she said.

4. Become a Mentor

Strong DevOps managers actively mentor junior staff and create space for senior team members to do the same. This matters more than it might seem: when only one or two people hold critical knowledge, those individuals become single points of failure for the entire service or product.

“Often, senior folks are discouraged from mentoring, and implicitly encouraged to become the single point of failure on the team, as they can get the work done quicker than the new folks,” Davis said. Over time, this pattern creates fragile systems and team burnout. A healthier model distributes knowledge broadly, giving everyone the ability to contribute and respond to incidents.

As a manager, actively protect time for mentorship—treat it as an investment in system reliability and team resilience, not a distraction from “real” work.

5. Prioritize Continuous Learning

Investing in the knowledge and skills of your team pays dividends across the board. Davis notes that the opportunity to learn is one of the key drivers of employee satisfaction—and satisfied employees build better, more reliable products.

Kromhout describes the ideal DevOps manager as someone who “encourages a human-centered approach that values the experiences of the team, while continuing to challenge them to learn and develop.” In practice, this means:

• Allocating dedicated time for training, reading, and experimentation
• Supporting attendance at industry events like DevOpsDays or internal knowledge-sharing sessions
• Celebrating curiosity and rewarding learning, not just delivery
• Rotating team members through different responsibilities to broaden skills

Key Takeaways

Becoming an effective DevOps manager is less about mastering new tools and more about evolving your leadership philosophy. The shift involves moving from a command-and-control posture to one centered on coaching, collaboration, and continuous improvement. To summarize:

1. Start where you are — no reorganization required; adapt your current role.
2. Reframe failure — treat experiments as data, not verdicts.
3. Lead through collaboration — build cross-team relationships and run blameless postmortems.
4. Mentor actively — distribute knowledge to eliminate single points of failure.
5. Champion learning — invest in your team’s growth as a core management responsibility.

Original source: TechRepublic. Quotes attributed to Jeff Sussna (Ingineering.IT), Jennifer Davis (co-author, Effective DevOps), and Bridget Kromhout (Cloud Foundry / DevOpsDays).