Ops - A CLI for Teams

Announcing Ops...

Today we're really excited to announce Ops - A CLI that has been built from the ground up for development teams who care about automation but don't have time in their busy product roadmap to invest into the automation of their operations.

Beginning today we are going to start pulling back the curtain to show how we're giving companies we work with an unfair advantage over the competition by using automation intelligence to improve the cadence of their software delivery.

In the coming months, we'll be on-boarding new customers onto our platform so we can help more teams with workflow automations using our Ops CLI.

Someone told me once that any good announcement should follow the who, what, why, where, when & how process so without any more delays, let's get into it...

Who?

CTO.ai has been operating in Vancouver, BC for about 16 months now and was started by myself, Kyle Campbell, after being CTO of my last startup; Retsly.

After working with Zillow for 2.5 years, a number of different startups asked me to join their team as CTO, so I spent some time considering what they would need.

The more I looked at what these teams needed from me, the more I saw parallels with the developer operations strategies that I felt were core to high performing engineering teams. Thus I began spending all of my time obsessing about how to solve the operational challenges that engineering teams face at scale.

Based on my experience building a number of teams over the years, I believed that we could provide a way for companies to solve many of these relevant challenges even if they could not attract "Dev Ops Engineers" or a "CTO" onto their teams.

The demand has been overwhelming and very validating.

We've grown to a team of ~55 and we've hired 90% in the last 12 months. We're growing quickly, we're profitable and we're super excited about scaling our mission.

During this time we also began working with companies large and small to help them achieve their technology goals by offering them developer operations as a way to verify our thesis that automation intelligence can accelerate delivery success.

We decided to boil all of this learning down into a self service platform.

What?

A CLI that has been built from the ground up to enable developers to make custom automations available across an entire team instantly. Developers then use these automations to quickly perform non-trivial tasks in their day to day workflows.

The simple example above shows a custom workflow that our team is currently working on to demonstrate the potential of this experience. The CLI is custom built to make it extremely simple for anyone to build these automations, which we call "ops".

Why?

Over the last year we've spent an incredible amount of time speaking with both the developers and stakeholders at companies of all sizes about how Dev Ops can improve the cadence of their software development lifecycle.

What has become extremely clear to us is that while every company wants to improve the cadence of their product delivery, very few have the time or experience to implement automation intelligence to create this efficiency for themselves.

Given our focus on helping companies to achieve this end, we decided to take all of our learning to offer the market a brand new platform that dramatically lowers the complexity of adopting automation intelligence within any team.

Where?

Everywhere! We're looking for early adopters who are open to having us lean in. Being the size we are, we have the benefit that we can get hands on with our early adopters to help them implement automation in their development teams.

For these early adopters we're also offering to spend time chatting with them 1:1 about how they are investing in building world class development teams. We are hoping to share these stories with the broader developer community to help companies elevate their brand by showing how they invest in developer success.

When?

As a starting point, we're releasing the Ops CLI into a closed beta over the next two months with an open beta that is scheduled to begin in the near future.

How?

We have a number of different kinds of ops that we intend to release in the future, but initially, we'll be focusing on our CLI.

The CLI is where developers spend most of their time and we're intending to make it so that all developers across your team have access to automation to help them improve the cadence of delivery by automating non-trivial tasks in their workflows.

Next Steps...

Head on over to CTO.ai and sign up for our beta. One of our team members will reach out for a discovery call to see how we can help you implement a great Dev Ops experience. If you aren't quite ready to jump in yet, please feel free to connect with our social media or even sign up for our beta to stay informed of when we announce new releases. We're planning to have something exciting for you very soon!