An Interview With Rachel Kline
Automation mindset — Leveraging tools and scripts to automate manual processes improves efficiency.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, DevOps has emerged as an essential philosophy, bridging the gap between software development and IT operations. A successful DevOps team not only speeds up the delivery process but ensures quality and reliability. However, creating such a team requires a harmonious amalgamation of tools, culture, processes, collaboration, and more. What are the critical components of a top-notch DevOps team, and how can organizations integrate them for optimum results? As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ron Gidron.
Ron Gidron is co-founder and C.E.O. of xtype.io, a platform engineering solution for ServiceNow (R) that allows enterprise customers to meet any level of demand from the platform and drive improved business outcomes at scale. Before founding xtype, Ron spent over two decades in enterprise technologies and cloud computing, holding various product and leadership roles in startups and some of the world’s largest technology companies.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?
My journey in the technology world began over two decades ago, long before xtype existed. I spent a significant portion of my early career in enterprise technology, taking on product and leadership roles. I was privileged to work with startups and global tech giants like HP, Symantec, and CA Technologies. These experiences gave me invaluable insights and a deep understanding of the industry.
But my passion and commitment weren’t just limited to the professional realm. I’ve always believed in the good of technology and making the future better for everyone. I think it is very evident in everything we see. I also believe in giving back to the community, which led me to volunteer as a night shift paramedic in Tel Aviv, the best city in the world and the one that gave me the technology ecosystem and environment to grow personally and professionally.
The idea for xtype was born from a desire to address an apparent, well-defined problem in the enterprise space. I founded xtype with my co-founders, Peter Szulman and Tobias (Tobi) Stanzel, to help customers unlock the full potential of ServiceNow, the most robust platform for running an enterprise business. I was fortunate to find the right team to bring xtype to life, and now together, we’re working towards revolutionizing how companies leverage the ServiceNow platform to achieve their goals.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My dad taught me at a very young age that “the key isn’t to try and have the answer to any question. You don’t need to know everything. The key to success is building a network of friends and colleagues who you can go to for advice on any question you have.” — I must have heard him say this hundreds of times since I was about five years old, and it is a vital part of how I work. He also taught me that with power comes responsibility and that responsibility “doesn’t roll downhill,” meaning that you need to remember that even if you’re following someone else’s counsel, the responsibility for your actions is always solely yours.
Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?
Three key strengths have been instrumental in shaping my career:
Embrace change and view it as an opportunity rather than a challenge. Continuously educate yourself, be open to feedback, and be willing to pivot when necessary.
Business success is a team sport. You can’t go it alone. No one achieves success in isolation. From my time at global tech firms to founding xtype, I’ve learned the importance of working with, building and nurturing a solid team. Collaborating with diverse perspectives and fostering an environment of open communication is critical.
“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss. Of enthusiasm”- Winston Churchill. Embrace failure. Each setback offers a lesson. Cultivate a growth mindset, and remember that resilience breeds success. Surround yourself with a supportive network that can offer encouragement during tough times.
Which skills are you still trying to grow now?
I am constantly learning and growing,
Strategic Leadership: While I’ve had a lot of experience in various roles in enterprise software, being a CEO presents unique challenges that require a strategic outlook on business and people management.
Emotional Intelligence: As a leader, it’s crucial to understand the business aspects and the emotional and psychological factors that drive my team. My wife Ruthie, who is a psychoanalyst, has been a tremendous influence in this area.
Risk Management: Building a startup inherently involves taking risks. I’m continuously learning to balance risk and reward, especially as xtype grows in valuation and scale.
Data-Driven Decision Making: My background in product management taught me the importance of metrics, but steering an entire company based on KPIs is a different ball game.
Let’s talk about having a successful DevOps team. What are the key goals a DevOps team might identify for a digital transformation journey?
The overarching goals for a DevOps team undertaking a digital transformation initiative are to accelerate the delivery of new products and features, increase software quality and reliability, and promote innovation — all while managing risk and compliance. So, for example, for a team looking to build a Center of Excellence (COE) around innovation and scale, it is essential to adopt modern development practices, optimize the delivery pipeline, and automate everything. There will also need to focus on collaboration between team members and other teams using central monitoring and standardized communication tools to ensure transparency. This is important, particularly in large enterprises where compliance demands separation of duties, which can lead to broken communications. However, this can be easily maintained with automation using roles and responsibilities efficiently and fully traceably.
Are there any challenges or common pitfalls that DevOps teams should consider?
DevOps teams often face two primary challenges: “Silos” and “Technical Debt.” First, organizational silos can hinder the collaboration that DevOps thrives on. If development, operations, and security teams are not aligned, it can lead to communication, inefficiencies, and ultimately, slower time-to-market. Second, technical debt can accumulate quickly in fast-paced DevOps environments. Skipping best practices for quick wins may result in a fragile system prone to errors and difficult to scale later on. We often see this in enterprise platforms, where most customers need more support between their environments that quickly become inconsistent. Teams should remain vigilant about these pitfalls and proactively seek solutions to mitigate their impact.
How can effective collaboration and communication among team members enhance the productivity and success of a DevOps team, and what practices can facilitate this?
I love the quote from Ken Blanchard, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Effective DevOps teams are high-collaborating teams. Critical practices facilitating this include regular stand-ups, knowledge sharing, collaboration tools, and social events to connect team members. Social events don’t have to be structured. A slack channel for sharing can be effective.
What role does CI/CD play in DevOps, and what are the best practices for implementing CI/CD pipelines to ensure a seamless and reliable software release process?
In a DevOps environment, CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) is the backbone for rapid, reliable software releases. CI/CD automates the steps from code commit to production deployment, ensuring a streamlined and error-free process. For a platform like ServiceNow, which our clients use, implementing CI/CD pipelines can significantly address challenges like instance inconsistencies and the need for instance synchronization. Using CI/CD, you can automate the testing of configuration changes and new features across different ServiceNow instances (Dev, Test, Prod), reducing the need for manual cloning and synchronization. This ensures that all instances are consistent and significantly speeds up the release process, aligning it with DevOps goals for efficiency and reliability.
How does fostering a DevOps culture and mindset contribute to the overall success of a DevOps team, and what strategies can organizations use to promote this culture among their development and operations teams?
DevOps isn’t just a technology approach; it’s a culture. You need a collaborative mindset from the top down. Leadership must be all-in, and teams should blend roles — no more silos. Make everyone accountable for the end product, not just their puzzle piece. Encourage open dialogue and learn from both wins and losses. Equip your teams with the right tools, but remember, technology supports people; it doesn’t replace them. Nail these, and you’re not just running a DevOps team, but you’re also cultivating a DevOps culture that can propel your entire organization to tremendous success.
What are the “5 Essential Components of a Successful DevOps Team”?
1. Cross-functional roles — Having members from development, operations, quality assurance (QA), security, and other groups create shared ownership.
I can give countless examples: xtype works predominantly with large enterprise customers using the ServiceNow platform. Almost every organization we meet tends to have (too many?) well-documented processes that describe the entire ServiceNow software development lifecycle, from request to build and up to permission to deploy. These processes are long and very stringent to ensure the stability and security of a mission-critical enterprise environment and involve different roles and responsibilities across different teams (product management, engineering, QA, and production support teams). In reality, these documents lead to a huge inefficiency because at almost any step, you have asynchronous actions (emails flying around, portal requests) and countless meetings at every step. This is where automation processes can streamline the entire process. When you employ a purpose-built platform engineering solution like xtype, the result is a transition from an asynchronous error-prone process into a streamlined and very efficient one. People “get their life back” and can focus on productive work instead of the “necessary evil” process.
2. Automation mindset — Leveraging tools and scripts to automate manual processes improves efficiency.
This is a critical point if you do not account for the end goal and all requirements. What we often see are teams that have “automated” one or two pieces of their process but still aren’t seeing any top-line improvement. Hence, the importance of considering the entire DevOps process first is paramount. Too many organizations are self-persuading themselves that they “have already automated.”, the truth is unless you have eliminated your backlogs and are not struggling with environment inconsistencies or ever needing to clone, you’re probably not done and may want to take a fresh look at your DevOps strategy.
3. Collaboration culture — Fostering open communication and transparency breaks down silos.
We recently helped one of our enterprise customers streamline their internal ServiceNow development, QA, and production release process. The key to success? Open communication and transparency across their development and operational teams. We set up shared workflows, shared monitoring dashboards, and real-time process monitoring, which everyone could access. This broke down silos, sped up decision-making, and helped them quickly move from problem to solution. It wasn’t just about deploying software faster but about creating a culture where information flows freely, allowing for quicker, more informed decisions.
4. Customer focus — Keeping the end-user experience central drives better solutions.
While xtype doesn’t directly affect the user experience of the software applications that our customers are building, there is also the aspect of user experience to the process itself. For example, consider how, using xtype, an entire organization could move from the tedious and manual process I described above into a streamlined, zero-touch process. This has a huge impact on user experience and affects people’s everyday lives, both at work and at home, when they don’t need to spend weekends and off hours in the office on bridge calls and release days.
5. Continuous improvement — Regular retrospectives and gathering feedback enable continuous learning.
xtype embeds code reviews, automated code scans, and conflict remediation into the software development lifecycle of our clients using ServiceNow also saves every step in a product screen’s audit trail. ServiceNow teams using us are immediately always on the same page, and we are getting great feedback from customers on this very point.
What emerging trends do you foresee in the landscape of DevOps that could significantly impact digital transformation strategies in the future?
Emerging trends in DevOps, like AI and ML automation, Zero Trust Security, and GitOps, are setting new standards for digital transformation. However, specifically for us and our work with ServiceNow teams, advancements in AI-Ops, Service Graph data management, and cross-enterprise workflow automation offer significant opportunities to enterprises but add complexity and security requirements. By integrating these emerging capabilities, xtype can continue to provide cutting-edge, purpose-built ServiceNow platform engineering solutions that streamline and secure complex enterprise workflows, enhancing service delivery and customer satisfaction.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
If I could spark a movement separate from my work at xtype, it would be aimed at transforming global education. The focus would be on driving innovation, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking, but with an emphasis on accessibility and creating a politically neutral, safe environment for learning. In today’s interconnected world, it’s not enough to make strides in education in isolated pockets; we need a universally accessible platform. The goal would be to provide every child with access to high-quality education regardless of location or socioeconomic status. This platform would be a safe space, free from political or ideological biases, to ensure that children can learn, grow, and form their views without external influence. The objective isn’t merely to create job-ready individuals but to nurture globally aware, empathetic, and intellectually curious human beings. Such a movement could have a domino effect, leading to more global, equitable, tolerant, and innovative societies.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Ron Gidron of xtype: Five Essential Components Of A Successful DevOps Team was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.