What does the team need for a thriving innovation culture while enjoying high throughput and industry leading quality of service? Maturity here is marked by being able to work productively over long periods while maintaining trust. Cutomer and shareholder trust is supported by regularly exercised controls for security, privacy, cost, compliance and business continuity. Team trust is supported by a generative culture. Teams have enough space to run multiple experiments in parallel. A quality culture across teams upholds not just the quality of new work, but ensures services reliability and performance are meeting customer expectations.

Generative Culture 🔗

Establish and sustain a high-trust, performance oriented organisational culture where information flows freely, cross-functional cooperation thrives, failure leads to inquiry rather than blame and innovation is actively encouraged. (Based on Ron Westrum's organisational culture research.)

💎 Benefit: This foundation fosters psychological safety, shared responsibility and systemic learning. including faster lead time, more frequent releases, quicker recovery from failures and higher job satisfaction. Teams are empowered to take smart risks, innovate and learn from mistakes without fear, resulting in sustainable and high-performing outcomes.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Teams actively seek and share knowledge, even bad news, across silos and hierarchies.
  • Failures prompt inquiry and collective learning rather than blame
  • Leaders respond with support and curiosity.
  • Quality, reliability and availability are embraced as a team responsibility, not siloed.
  • Novel ideas are welcomed & implemented, teams have permission & mechanisms to explore improvements.

Governance & Standardisation 🔗

Standardisation ensures a consistent approach to practices and outputs, enabling teams to work in predictable and reliable ways. Governance provides clear, verifiable controls across security, privacy, cost, compliance, business continuity and the use of Artifical Intelligence (AI). Teams enjoy efficient engineering workflows that ensure compliance with organisational and regulatory requirements.

💎 Benefit: Enable scaling of teams, products and services, while maintaining team-level independence by standardisation of common concerns. This builds trust in engineering outputs and supports compliance with internal and external regulations. Reduced technical and process diversity of lower-level needs improves cross-team collaboration and ensures governance requirements are met without burdening day-to-day work.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Annual or regular audits do not interrupt the team's regular work.
  • Governance controls are highly automated and embedded into the engineering workflow.
  • Work or team members can move between teams with little friction.
  • Onboarding of individuals or external partners is efficient and frictionless.
  • AI policy and controls are clear and ensure effective use of AI tools.

Value Generation 🔗

The team maximises learning and customer value through rapid, small feedback loops. Work is broken into small batches that can be delivered, tested, and iterated on quickly. By experimenting frequently and gathering fast feedback, the team reduces risk, adapts to change and maintains a high throughput of value delivery.

💎 Benefit: To enable rapid innovation and value generation. Minimise waste by validating ideas early and often. Frequent, small deliveries ensure that the team continuously learns what works, while keeping effort and risk low.

📶 Signal(s):

  • Hypotheses, experiments and data analysis systematically test and validate assumptions.
  • Experiments are used to genuinely acquire new knowledge rapidly.
  • Teams maintain a steady flow of value delivery rather than large, infrequent releases.
  • Decisions to continue, pivot, or stop work are made based on real feedback, not assumptions.

Quality of Service 🔗

The culmination of logging > Alerting > Incident Management > SLIs > SLOs and Product Metrics into a proactive approach where service health trends inform decisions alongside new features. The team proactively tests their business continuity procedures (e.g. backup, recovery, replication and failover) to meet their business continuity commitments.

💎 Benefit: Balancing value generation with value protection. Maintain or improve service reliability and user experience over time, anticipating issues before customers notice. Moves SLIs/SLOs from "measurement only" to a driver for decision-making. Ability to recover from disasters.

📶 Signal(s):

  • High-stakes company events proceed without restrictions on deployments.
  • Roadmap and weekly items are regularly driven by service health insights.
  • Degradation is detected before customers report it.
  • Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are validated regularly.