Practice : Feedback Loops from Ops to Dev

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Strong feedback loops from Operations to Development ensure that real-world issues, usage patterns, and customer-impacting incidents inform design and development decisions. These loops close the gap between building and running software - accelerating learning, reducing rework, and improving resilience.

When operational insights are shared early and often, developers build more robust, observable, and supportable systems - and teams collaborate more effectively across the full software lifecycle.

Description of the Practice

  • Operations teams proactively share logs, metrics, incident learnings, support tickets, and customer pain points with developers.
  • Feedback is routed through structured channels (e.g. retros, dashboards, chat threads, ops reviews) and informal connections (e.g. office hours, pairing).
  • Loops are two-way: developers help improve operational tooling and automation, while operations inform architectural and prioritisation decisions.
  • Over time, this practice embeds shared ownership for system health and customer outcomes.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Set up a shared space (e.g. Slack channel, ops review doc, dashboard) for capturing and sharing operational feedback.
  • Invite developers to join incident reviews and postmortems as active participants.
  • Include operational learnings in sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog refinement.
  • Highlight common issues, manual interventions, and sources of pain or toil.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Establish recurring Ops–Dev syncs or reliability councils to review patterns and priorities.
  • Correlate incident themes and support tickets to backlog items or technical debt.
  • Promote cross-functional swarming on operational incidents for deeper empathy and insight.
  • Automate surfacing of operational signals into developer tools (e.g. Sentry alerts in Jira, Datadog into Slack).
  • Recognise and reward teams who act on operational feedback and improve reliability.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Ask: “What can we learn from this incident?” not just “How do we fix it?”
  • Stay curious - dig into signals even when they aren’t blocking delivery.
  • Celebrate operational wins - like reduced alert noise or faster recovery.
  • Build relationships - Ops and Dev are partners, not silos.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Feedback that is ignored or siloed - without action or visibility.
  • Ops teams becoming gatekeepers rather than collaborators.
  • Developers only hearing about failures, not successes or patterns.
  • Noisy alerts or poorly defined metrics drowning out valuable feedback.

5. Signals of Success

  • Developers proactively address reliability, observability, and supportability.
  • Operational feedback influences design, prioritisation, and roadmap decisions.
  • MTTR and incident recurrence decrease over time.
  • Collaboration between Ops and Dev feels regular, respectful, and productive.
  • Learning from operations becomes a habit, not a post-incident task.