Devops for Managers (reboot)

[behemphi]

As a manager of devops team or a leader of a collection of teams, I would like to have a place to meet peers and exchange ideas.

[behemphi]

Motivation

It keeps coming up that this would be a great idea. Data from previous attempt supports that.

Background

ℹ This is intended to inform and not prescribe.

Circa mid 2015, at the behest of Eric G, we spun up a "DevOps For Managers" monthly meetings. We thought we would get 5 to 8 folks initially. IIRC the first was attended by 20 and we regularly had 15 or more.

The effort died simply because I ran out of energy after I left Stackengine where it was part of my job to foster the meetup. To be clear - the interest was still there and to this day I continued to be asked about it.

Mechanically:

• We picked a date
• We used the Austin DevOps meetup
• We simply put "For Managers: " in the title to namespace it

Venue:
Our venue was the meeting space at Rack just outside the security zone. Boardroom table seating 16 IIRC with great AV and plenty of chairs around the outside when we got a big group.

Eric and I felt this venue facilitate the peer conversation better than the main room after about 3 months as we didn't want it to be the same as the main 2nd Monday meeting. This seemed to be the general agreement of those attending as I informally took the pulse of those attending.

Our reasoning was to keep it simple and not spin up a new meetup, etc. At the time we already had over 2000 members so it was automatic to reach a wide audience of people with interest.

The first meetup was Tristan Slominski talking Wardley mapping (pretty new back then) and it was clear that was a great topic.

You can still find these looking at past events for some fodder to ideate on topics and formats. here is an example

Some cool side effects

CZ would show up and was not a manager. I'd have classified him at the time as thought leader and staff level engineer. I'd not considered until that night the importance to me as a manager of my reliance on my staff level folks explicitly. So our audience expanded immediately.

We had several curious IC's attend and some said, "I think I learned I don't want to be a manager", while others said they learned more about a path they were considering. Some came to learn how to better communicate with their leadership.

SIGS

At this time we already had a precedent for special interest groups. Matt Ray had, for years, run Chef Breakfast through the meetup as a separate meeting from the main 2nd Monday with great results.

Mouton and I tried to help Jessica ?? from Github and a guy from RetailMeNot get an SRE SIG going but they were unable to pull it off (energy/commitment I think)