> Having the maintenance/ops requirements directly feed back into the design and engineering of the product is genuinely powerful.

You’re so right. This is the key, whether a team is doing devops or not.

One of my major contributions when I took on a CTO role was getting dev, ops, and support teams to talk about the pain points. There were so many easy wins to make things run better because the teams didn’t understand the difficulties the other teams were going through.