Engineering Unblocked Develop, deploy, operate: Three stages of delivering business value with Titus Winters from Adobe
Jul 31, 2025
Titus Winters, Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe and former Google engineer, dives into optimizing software value. He argues that humans should only be involved in the creative development phase, labeling the deployment phase as pure toil. Winters introduces a framework dividing software into three stages: creative development, factory-like deployment, and operational maintenance. He also discusses the importance of quantifying the costs of software defects and the critical need for organizations to understand the balance between developer productivity and effective platformization.
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Titus Winters' Career Journey
- Titus Winters worked 13 years at Google, leading the C++ monorepo and contributing to C++20 design.
- He now focuses on developer experience at Adobe, emphasizing effective tools over superficial perks.
Challenge of Measuring Bug Impact
- Measuring bug prevention impact is very challenging compared to infrastructure improvements.
- Titus’s growing understanding led to a paper offering a clearer framework for software value measurement.
Three Phases of Software Delivery
- Software delivery consists of three phases: creative develop, automated deploy, and operational maintenance.
- Humans add value only during development; their presence post-merge causes inefficiency.