You run a startup. You’ve just raised your first serious money, and need to start spending it wisely to hit your goals you promised to your investor.

You’re hiring developers like crazy, but going slower than ever! What’s gone wrong?

Your Lead Developer keeps saying “we need to build a CD/CI pipeline, so I’m going to take one developer away to focus on that, it’ll make life better in the long run”. And you go “No! We need all hands on getting the next Shiny New Feature out, we have no time for whatever you just said..”

Sound familiar? We, as a profession, need to get better at explaining what we do in terms that a non-technical startup CEO can understand.

I’m going to take some examples of DevOps projects and show how the language we use to describe them can turn them from a cost into an investment. So your CEO will want to put money into your DevOps project, not fight to hold it back.

Rachel Willmer has been working at the “bleeding edge” of technology for more than 3 decades, as a programmer, network engineer, manager, startup founder. She remains insatiably curious about how