I spent years taking on development teams and transforming them into high performers and the team members were never the problem. This session leans on years of "transformations" and a decade of research to provide some concrete steps you can take to do the same. The DORA research reveals what elite performers do differently, but knowing what to improve and actually making improvements are different challenges. This session cuts through the complexity to focus on the handful of high-impact capabilities you can start using today. You'll learn where to start for the biggest returns, how to sequence your efforts, and how to build momentum toward elite performance levels without trying to transform everything at once.

Steve Fenton researches the socio-technical systems behind software delivery; how organizations, people, and technology actually work together (or don’t). At Octopus Deploy, he explores GitOps, Platform Engineering, Continuous Delivery, and compliance through a lens shaped by punk history, psychology, and the kind of genre fiction that asks uncomfortable questions about systems and society.

He’s an eight-time Microsoft MVP (DevOps), a DORA Community Guide, and a member of the CNCF Platform Engineering Community Group. He’s written books on TypeScript, Octopus Deploy, and Web Operations Monitoring, and occasionally writes horror fiction that reveals truths about how things actually work.

A self-described Software Punk, pragmatist-abstractionist, and generalising-generalist, Steve studied Psychology at OSC and the history of punk (1976-1978) at the University of Reading. Those aren’t side interests; they’re how he thinks.