Together with Jenny Phillips, Director of Platform Engineering at lululemon, and Nathen Harvey, DORA report author, we explore how years of data can guide organizations to adopt impactful strategies for solving sociotechnical challenges.
Enterprise transformation often starts with a question: where do we begin? For many technology leaders, the answer lies in understanding how software delivery performance connects to broader organizational outcomes. DORA metrics provide a proven framework for answering that question, helping teams identify friction, focus on what matters, and accelerate transformation efforts across the board.
By measuring key indicators like change lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR), teams gain visibility into both throughput and stability. As DORA’s research confirms, high-performing teams excel at both. The data shows that speed and stability are not trade-offs—they’re correlated.
But metrics alone don’t drive change. As Jenny Phillips, Director of Platform Engineering at lululemon, shared during our recent webinar, “It’s not the metrics that drive the change—it’s how leadership engages with them that does.” That alignment—between technical strategy, stakeholder concerns, and business outcomes—is where metrics become truly impactful.
Using DORA metrics effectively means connecting them to real-world decision-making. On high-performing teams, that starts with reflection and conversation.
As Robert Kelly, VP of Technology Enablement at Liatrio, noted, metrics are a lens. They help teams and leaders see what’s getting in the way of fast, safe delivery—and then do something about it. That requires leadership willing to listen, prioritize, and act. As the DORA report shows, even a 25% increase in transformational leadership leads to measurable gains in job satisfaction, productivity, and team performance.
Successful organizations tailor how they use metrics depending on the audience:
This layered approach ensures that every level of the organization sees value and understands where to focus improvement efforts.
Stable priorities, clear direction, and support for learning create the conditions where teams thrive. Metrics are just the beginning. The real power comes from leadership that encourages curiosity, creates space for innovation, and helps teams build better systems—day in and day out.
If you're ready to operationalize your DORA metrics, improve developer experience, and build a culture of continuous transformation, we can help. Contact us today to start your journey, or download the Ignite Playbook for proven strategies across all areas of enterprise transformation.
Transformational leadership—leading through change—can get lonely. And you're not alone. There's a community of change agents out there to support you. It's just being able to, I think, ask for the help, knowing that you're not alone and that there is a community out there that you can engage with. Over the last year, we asked enterprise technology leaders what their biggest challenges are when it comes to transformation. And the most common answer was: where do I start? So how can enterprises use the right metrics to take the first step and turn data into meaningful change? Hello and welcome to today's webinar: How Technology Leaders Use Data to Improve the Efficiency of End-to-End Digital Value Delivery. My name is Taylor Berry, a lead marketer at Liatrio, and today we'll explore how leaders can leverage data to drive transformation in their organizations—and we'll hear real experiences from a few who are leading them. We have a brilliant group of experts joining us today, kicking off with Jenny Phillips from lululemon. Why don't you kick us off, Jenny? Thank you so much, Taylor. I'm so excited to be here with you, Robert, and Nathen. Again, Jenny Phillips—I've been in tech for almost 20 years. I'm currently a tech director of platform engineering. My career has spanned software engineering, transformation initiatives, and building high-performing teams that really drive innovation and efficiency across the SDLC. I'm passionate about leveraging technology to create scalable solutions and enabling organizations to adapt and grow in this ever-evolving landscape. I'm just really excited to share insights and experiences that can help anyone navigate through challenges and opportunities in tech transformation. So—really excited to dive in. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jenny. How about you, Nathen? Hey, thanks Taylor. Hi everyone—my name is Nathen Harvey. I work at Google Cloud and I lead up a program called DORA. We'll talk a lot about DORA, but basically, my history is I’ve been in tech for a long, long time and I’ve had the pleasure of helping and learning from many different organizations as they go through this organizational transformation process—adopting new technologies, everything from infrastructure automation to how do we get better at using the newest AI coding assistants. So it’s been a really, really fun journey, and I’m really excited to be here. Awesome. Thanks so much, Nathen. How about you, Robert? Thanks, Taylor. Great to see everybody. I'm Robert Kelly, VP of Technology Enablement with Liatrio. Liatrio is focused on leading enterprise technology transformation and has been a long-time DORA advocate. Our missions are really aligned—I think DORA is really the foundation in the industry for reinforcing all of the things that we’re doing day-to-day. And specifically, that work is partnering with folks like Jenny and her teams and really helping their organizations improve. So—glad to be here. Awesome. Thanks so much, Robert. So before we get into it, I did want to preface the conversation with how amazing the DevOps and digital transformation community is. Everyone on this panel is connected because of a common interest and personal investment in helping enterprises succeed in technology transformations. Just for example—Liatrio has been attending the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit, formerly known as the DevOps Enterprise Leadership Summit, for nearly ten years. And it’s actually how we met Jenny. So Jenny, can you tell us a bit about what made you decide to attend ETLS and what your experience was like? You know, I hadn’t had a chance to attend the ETLS conference in person, so it was really a last-minute opportunity. The week before, I reached out to Gene’s team and asked if there was still availability. The reason why I wanted to attend in person was I wanted to have those face-to-face connections with folks like Nathen, and to be able to meet teams like Liatrio, to really understand some of the tough problems that they’ve solved, how they’ve leveraged DORA metrics to accomplish that, and to really connect with others within the community. That’s what I really like about the ETLS community—it’s just such a tight-knit community of technologists that really want to help each other through experimentation, reports, and data collection. I’m really glad I took the jump and decided to go last minute, because I was able to meet the Liatrio team and also run into connections like Nathen. Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much, Jenny. Nathen, Robert—what do you guys think? What other parts of the community have you been a part of that helped you get to where you are today? Yeah, I think probably—certainly ETLS is a big part of where I am today. But in addition to that, I would point to the DevOps Days collection of events that happen around the world. DevOps as a movement probably started around 2009. DevOps Days have been hosted for about 15 years now, and I’ve been to many of them around the world. And it’s always just such a pleasure to get together and connect with practitioners and leaders who are doing this work every single day. Those connections are the thing that really drive all of us forward as an industry. I agree. Really, Nathen, you and I haven’t talked about this, but I first met you at a DevOps Days—I think in Dallas, back in 2016, to be honest—when you were doing a talk there. So we go back a long time. And I think that’s really what this industry has built—this amazing community of collaboration. Whether it’s ETLS, DevOps Days, or just things we’re doing today, it’s really about helping everyone improve. I love it. I can’t wait to chat more. So let’s get into it. I’m going to pass it over to Nathen. Can you tell us a bit about DORA and give us some highlights of this year’s DORA report? Yeah, absolutely. So DORA is a research program that’s been running for over a decade now that really seeks to understand: how do technology-driven teams get better? DORA each year publishes a report—and I hope that you’ve had a chance to download and read the 2024 report. It’s our latest in the series, but if you haven’t, you can grab it at this URL or by scanning the QR code there. Now, Jenny mentioned the DORA metrics. DORA has always had a center of gravity around software delivery performance, and this is really where those metrics come in. We’re measuring software delivery performance. But before we talk about the specifics of the metrics, I want to talk about the why. Why do we care about these metrics? You see, software delivery performance—and the metrics that tell us how we’re doing with it—are proven to be good leading indicators for the outcomes that we all care about. Outcomes like good organizational performance and well-being for the people on our team. And what our research has shown—and really dug into—is the ways in which you can improve your software delivery performance. The way that you get better is by having the right capabilities and conditions within your organization. Capabilities like a climate for learning, fast flow, and fast feedback. As you improve those capabilities, that is predictive—or leads to—better software delivery performance, which in turn leads to the great outcomes we’re all looking for. So now—how do you measure software delivery performance? Well, when you think about software delivery performance, there are kind of two high-level things: the throughput of change and the stability of those changes. We want to be able to ship software as fast as our team is able to, but we want to make sure that when we ship software, it lands well in production. It shouldn’t cause outages or incidents. This leads us to the four DORA software delivery performance metrics: The first two are about throughput. Change lead time: how long it takes a code change to go from commit to running in production. Deployment frequency: how often you’re deploying to production. Then we have the stability side. Change failure rate: what percentage of deployments require immediate attention (rollback, hotfix, etc.). Mean time to recovery (MTTR): how long it takes to recover from a failed deployment. When I say “system,” I don’t just mean the cloud instances or infrastructure—I mean the socio-technical system, the people, teams, and processes. Taken together, these four metrics can be used to measure software delivery performance across any tech stack—mainframe, web, mobile, etc. Another really interesting finding: throughput and stability are not trade-offs. Over more than a decade, we’ve found they’re correlated. The best-performing teams have both high throughput and high stability. The teams that struggle? They have lower throughput and lower stability. These measures are predictive of the outcomes we care about, but again—the way to get better is by improving your internal capabilities. Things like CI practices, test automation, team culture, and documentation quality. You start with measuring performance, then look left: what capabilities are holding us back? Make targeted improvements, and you’ll see those metrics—and organizational outcomes—improve. That’s how DORA thinks about metrics. But Jenny, I’d love to hear how you’ve used metrics in your own journey. Thanks so much, Nathen. As you said, organizations with higher maturity levels actively seek insights from DORA metrics to drive continuous improvement. But the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that it’s not the metrics that drive the change—it’s how leadership engages with them that does. Whether you’re driving technical strategy, improving team performance, or influencing executive decisions, the key is aligning with what different stakeholders care about—risk mitigation, customer impact, financial efficiency. That alignment is what gives metrics real power. Yeah, absolutely—I love that. Two things stood out to me: first, you said “continuous improvement,” which is the whole point. DORA is about helping teams get better at getting better. And second, you emphasized that metrics don’t magically drive improvement—they’re just a compass. They help you orient. The action is what matters. Robert, I know you’ve helped many teams—how do metrics play into your day-to-day? It really is about reflection. It’s about giving teams access to what they need to improve, and reinforcing that what they’re doing matters. Sometimes we don’t stop to think about it—we just build software. But looking through the DORA lens helps us isolate what’s in our way. It helps us raise awareness of blockers. And that’s also where transformational leadership comes in. Leaders can use these metrics to take a cue from their teams and take action. It’s not just about insight—it’s about empowering change. Yeah, I always say metrics are there to start a conversation. That’s what gets us to action and improvement. I also want to touch on developer experience, another key theme in the 2024 DORA report. And we can boil it down to one sentence: Put the user first, and everything else falls into place. It’s easy to get excited about AI models, service meshes, or the latest tech—but we do all of that for a reason: to help the user. Highly user-centric teams—that is, teams who understand and prioritize the needs of their users—tend to build better products. And user-centricity doesn’t just mean customer-facing teams. It can mean platform teams building for other engineers. It means knowing who your users are and what they’re trying to accomplish. We looked at one graph in the report that ties this all together—software delivery throughput, user centricity, and product performance. TL;DR: highly user-centric teams have higher product performance, and as delivery throughput increases, so does user centricity. The better you understand your users, the more meaningful your iterations become. Jenny, I know you think about user experience constantly—how does this play out on your teams at lululemon? I think user centricity—especially when paired with developer throughput—really helps us focus on metrics like deployment frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR. One approach I’ve found useful is breaking things down by audience. So we look at it from three angles: Developers focus on things like lead time, deployment frequency, and MTTR. Managers care about team efficiency and friction, so they use the data to improve experience and remove bottlenecks. Executives are looking for alignment with business outcomes—risk mitigation, operational efficiency, etc. I love lead time—it’s my favorite metric. I think it unlocks a lot. When lead time is long, it usually means there’s friction. So if you improve lead time, you tend to unlock improvements across the board. Totally agree. Long lead times hurt developers and prevent teams from learning. Fast, safe delivery is critical for both feedback and morale. One final section I want to discuss is from this year’s report around leading transformations and the idea of transformational leadership. Some of what we found was new; a lot of it validated things we already suspected. The first and maybe most important point: stable environments are where people thrive. Contrast that with unstable environments—where priorities shift constantly and you never know from week to week what you'll be working on. Productivity drops. Burnout rises. It's really important for organizations to stabilize priorities and create consistency. Now, AI is actually helping in this area—not necessarily because leaders are asking AI what their priorities should be, but because AI has become a clear organizational focus. That clarity gives teams a shared direction, which provides much-needed stability. We also looked at the role of transformational leadership—and what makes someone a transformational leader. We identified five core traits: Vision Inspirational communication Intellectual stimulation Supportiveness Personal recognition These leaders lift up their teams, recognize contributions, and create conditions for innovation. And when transformational leadership increases—by even 25%—we saw significant improvements in: Job satisfaction Productivity Team performance Product performance Organizational performance And? Burnout decreases dramatically. Jenny, what do you think? I couldn’t agree more. It actually brought me back to when I first came into tech. When you mentioned transactional leadership, the first book that came to mind was Who Moved My Cheese?—it’s all about adapting to change. But my first real encounter with transformation—at least as a formal concept—was about ten years ago. I was part of a team replacing a critical billing system. Initially, it seemed like a technical upgrade, but I quickly realized it was so much more. The challenge wasn’t just technology—it was people. The shift required teams to change how they worked, adopt new processes, and embrace a more sophisticated mindset. Over time, I’ve come to see transformation as much more than systems and tools. It’s about mindset shifts. It’s about evolving culture. The metrics are valuable, but ultimately, leaders are opening doors for their teams—whether it’s platform engineering, AI, or developer experience. Our job is to help unlock those efficiencies and focus the organization on what matters most. Absolutely. What you laid out—courage, innovation, and execution—is something we can all reflect on. Sometimes it just takes the courage to start. And that means showing up, being present, listening to your teams, and leading by example. That’s where transformational leadership begins. I’d also add—leadership through change can be lonely. And I think that’s why communities like ETLS are so important. That’s where you can find support, find allies, and surround yourself with people who get what you’re going through. Huge +1 to that. And let’s not forget: leadership isn’t about where you sit on the org chart. Whether you’re an individual contributor or a CEO, you can exhibit courage, innovation, and execution—and lead transformational change. What a great conversation. We’ve covered so much today—from DORA metrics to developer experience to leadership—and we heard powerful firsthand stories from leaders driving change at scale. Huge thanks to our panelists: Jenny, Nathen, and Robert—for sharing your time, your insights, and your passion. So—one final question. If you had to share one key takeaway, what would it be? I’d say: transformational leadership can get lonely. But you are not alone. There’s a community of change agents out there to support you. You just have to ask for help and engage. As leaders, I think we need to create more opportunities for our teams to improve. We won’t know where to focus unless we listen, get the right data, and really understand what our teams need. And that’s why we’re talking about DORA—because it’s the lens into that understanding. And I would say—transformation doesn’t have an endpoint. It’s continuous. Taking the next step is more important than reaching a finish line. That capacity for change—for learning, for adapting—is what really defines success. This has been such a fun and meaningful conversation. I want to thank Liatrio for being a gold sponsor of the 2024 DORA report. It's been great to build these connections across the industry and community. I also want to thank Liatrio for being such strong partners in my journey leading transformation and change. I’m grateful to have met the team through the ETLS Summit. Awesome—great to hear. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation and want to continue learning about transformational leadership, we’ve got a ton of resources for you. If you’re looking for practical strategies or next steps, reach out to the team at Liatrio—we’d love to help guide your transformation journey. We also wrote about four key areas of enterprise transformation and dozens of winning strategies for each. You can find them in the Ignite Playbook, which you can download [link/QR code provided]. And of course, the 2024 DORA Report includes all the research we discussed today. Also, we’ll be attending the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit again this year—so if you're going, connect with us there. We’d love to talk. Finally, keep the conversation going. Connect with our panelists on LinkedIn and stay engaged with the DORA community for ongoing insights. Thanks again to Jenny, Nathen, and Robert—and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We hope you walk away with actionable ideas to use in your own organizations. Be sure to check out our upcoming webinars, events, and content. That’s it for today—thanks again, and we’ll see you next time.