Even the best DevOps teams hit slowdowns: rising incidents, unclear ownership, decision bottlenecks, and frustrated engineers. But the root cause is rarely the tools or the tech. It’s the leadership patterns shaping how teams communicate, align, and make decisions under pressure.

In this talk, I’ll share the real organizational failure modes I’ve seen across 20+ years of leading distributed engineering orgs, including scaling Compute at DigitalOcean. We’ll unpack why hero culture, architectural ambiguity, and tactical management quietly break DevOps, and what high-performing teams do differently.

Attendees will walk away with practical, lightweight frameworks to improve decision velocity, reduce cognitive load, and create the alignment needed to scale reliable systems without burning out their people.

Limor Bergman Gross is a former Director of Engineering at DigitalOcean, where she scaled the Compute engineering organization, improved system reliability, and led cross-functional architectural