Production First Mindset

deployment-velocity, DevOps, error-budgets, site-reliability I had a great conversation with Liran Haimovitch, CTO of Rookout, on his Production First Mindset podcast. We covered a lot of ground — error budgets, deployment velocity, growth engineering, and the weird dual life of running your own SaaS product while simultaneously shipping software that your customers self-host. That last one doesn’t get talked about enough. When you’re both the operator and the vendor, you’re playing two different games at once. How you think about risk, release cadence, and feature design changes depends on which hat you’re wearing. We got into the specifics of how I approach that at GitLab. We also talked about what it actually means to deploy over 100 times a day — not as a vanity metric, but as an outcome of how you build teams and structure work. And growth engineering: what it means, where it fits in the org, and why it matters for customer value. If you’re in engineering leadership and you’re…