Develop, deploy, operate: Three stages of delivering business value with Titus Winters from Adobe

In this episode, Titus Winters discusses his framework for optimizing software’s commercial value, why having humans in the deploy phase is pure toil, and how to think about engineering productivity investments.

Titus Winters brings infrastructure thinking to software economics — revealing why manual deployment processes are pure overhead and how to quantify the true cost of defects with a (sometimes) simple formula. His framework splits software into three phases: creative development, factory-like deployment, and operational maintenance, arguing that humans belong only in the first.

Find the transcript at: https://www.swarmia.com/podcast/titus-winters-adobe/

(0:00) Introductions
(3:58) Why Titus is drawn to this space
(6:21) How do you measure the impact of preventing a bug?
(8:36) How this paper came to be
(10:45) Why is it so hard for non-technical leadership to understand engineering?
(12:42) How relevant is the framework for smaller organizations?
(13:52) Estimating the true cost of defects
(17:40) Measure systems, not individuals
(18:25) Why humans in the deployment loop are pure toil
(22:17) Why DORA doesn’t measure the squishy, creative part of software development
(27:26) Infrastructure investment below 10% kills companies
(29:39) Changes in regulations that affect software companies
(31:36) How much should organizations spend on ‘platformization’
(36:00) Why teams should run at 70% capacity, not 100%
(40:15) Product vs engineering responsibilities
(42:04) Titus’ hot take on AI
(44:55) Where to find the paper

Follow Titus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tituswinters/

Follow Rebecca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/