 I'm in marketing, but please hold your booze until the end. I'm here today actually to talk about how marketing plays a critical role in DevOps, but is often forgotten. So you want to think about it from the start as a critical component to your journey if you have any plans to scale. So I've seen this over the last three or four years talking to folks at mostly larger companies. They launch a pilot project. It goes great. And then they're left kind of scratching their heads and saying, now what? So I'm going to walk you through some best practices in a pretty typical scenario, where you get why DevOps is important. You're moving on to how to actually do it. You're assembling your team. And you are, this is critical, planning ahead to market your DevOps success internally. So when you're assembling your pilot team, you should be including sales and marketing reps. Please do this. Your team should be willing, able, and committed to the project. And you should identify some management level sponsors. They can help you get past those pesky review boards and things that other folks today have been talking about, if need be. The goals of the pilot team are usually the same. Culture change and process improvements are in there, as well as funding for tools. If you're looking for culture and process changes, you're usually talking to colleagues and peers about that. And tools, you're usually talking to execs and management. So like I said, when your pilot's done, you're probably going to want to sell up or scale out. If you're selling up, you're talking to management and executives, usually looking for funding. If you're scaling out, you're talking to colleagues and peers, trying to get them to adopt these practices and bring it into their team. So when you kick off, you need to clearly define your project. It should be small and achievable, but meaningful and somewhat visible. You don't want to break your company's website if you fail, but you want someone to care. And you need to map out your key performance indicators from the start. That's super important. You also need to know your project goals and implications. Are you a tiny team and this is going to change everything for you if it goes well? Or are you trying to change an organization-wide cultural or process-related epidemic? When you get started, you want to capture your before-state. You need to start diligently taking down metrics at this point. You need to record how long things take, how many people are involved, what's going wrong, what are the pains associated with that. And you're going to measure this later against your key performance indicators. So that's why that's important. During your project, you need to record what you're hearing from your team, what isn't isn't working, challenges and how you're overcoming them, process improvements you're seeing, and the intangible, that's very important. Culture changes, overall happiness of your team. Are you guys smiling for the first time in a year? When you're done, you need to look at the before and after, compare those states. This is why you were taking down those metrics. You need to look for the biggest changes. Those are your marketing goal. Those are the nuggets that you want to extract from this journey. Okay, so your pilot project's done, your metrics are recorded. Now you need to bring your data together in a way that actually means something. If a DevOps tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it does not get funding for tools to answer that question. Okay, so now you're bringing together your story. You need to know who you're talking to, you need to understand their perspective and goals because they probably differ from yours and you need to package up that before, during and after state so that it actually speaks to them in a meaningful way. So if you're talking to executives and you're probably looking for funding here, they care about the big picture. If they're gonna give you any money, they wanna know what the return on investment will be. They also care about high level strategic goals, customer responsiveness, where you are with regard to your competitors, things like that staying ahead. So when you're talking to executives, you wanna speak their language, translate what you've done into something meaningful for them or the company's vision. You also need to not complain about your organization, present solutions, not problems and make sure that your timing is right. Don't put a meeting of the last day of the quarter when they're leaving for vacation. So in terms of ROI, it's great to say that you went from three weeks to two days on something but it's much better to say, that's a 95% reduction in time and it saved us X dollars. You might be able to do something much better with those dollars and if you can make the data visual, that's even better. Okay, so if you're talking to peers and colleagues, sure they care about time savings and process improvements and culture changes but they care about how you did it because they're probably like you and they're gonna be the boots on the ground actually making those changes so you wanna talk to them as a peer. So you don't have to come in as an authority figure and say, hey, we did DevOps, we're awesome. This is the law of how you do it now and this is how you're gonna do it. You wanna guide them a little bit, act as a mentor, help them assess their own situation and figure out how to best do it for their team. Okay, so you've analyzed your metrics. You know who your audience is. You have your before and after that probably make up your biggest and most impactful pillars but now sales and marketing can help you align all of that to a story in a meaningful way so you can go sell this to others in your organization. So to conclude, know your goals and your key performance indicators from the start. Plan ahead. Just do it and record metrics the whole time. Bring your results together and prioritize those with the highest impact and know your audience and speak their language. Thank you.