I help private equity portfolio companies maximize growth during the holding period using their technology organization.

Want to understand my philosophy? Read my book DevOps Patterns for Private Equity, then reach out to connect, or subscribe to the monthly email below.

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About

I have successfully led and coached DevOps transformations and operational maturity achievement at companies like Salesforce, Barracuda Networks, Cable & Wireless, MeridianLink, and SolarWinds.Despite being a Silicon Valley veteran, I'm not content to work only with unicorns, and have tackled some of the major cultural and structural impediments to Dev and Ops collaboration. I have successfully helped transform organizations to new models of service delivery, resulting in reduced customer churn, faster time to delivery, resiliency, improved margins, and increased ability to grow.Between my those, my book, and my best-selling video course, I have improved the lives of thousands of IT professionals around the world.

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Blogging:

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Featured In:

Public and Private speaking information can be found on the Speaking page I have also been a guest on a number of podcasts (and growing) which can be found on the Podcasts page.

Testimonials:

Gene Kim, author, The Unicorn Project, The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, Beyond the Phoenix Project, Accelerate, The Visible Ops Handbook, and Visible Ops Security

Jez Humble, author, Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and Accelerate

Case Studies:

• CDN
• Social Network

Assessments

From small portfolio add-ons to large public companies, the flat fee, standardized, interview-based Service Delivery Assessment helps you understand what you are doing well, but also provides a detailed discussion with specific recommendations, of capabilities to be improved, backed by the science of the Accelerate metrics.

Advisory Retainer

You want to help your lower middle market engineering teams to succeed with a trusted advisor who's been there before. Getting to know that company helps me help those leaders understand and improve their service delivery systems.After an initial kickoff, leaders have access to a dedicated Slack channel for any questions as well as regularly scheduled meetings to discuss challenges and progress. After two quarters, they are much better at applying DevOps principles to get outstanding results. Quarterly, limited availability.

Consulting

Custom consulting engagements to help you and your organization take advantage of the DevOps movement to achieve service delivery excellence by shipping more often and more confidently across the board. Including but not limited to: value streams, Agile, distributed teams, monitoring, incident response, retrospectives, project implementation.

Speaking Engagements

Check out the Speaking page!

Speaker

"You were among the top 2 rated speakers- yet again! Thanks so much for participating and for another great presentation." - Top 10 Private Equity Operating Partner

I'm available for speaking with your investments or at your portfolio conference.

In addition to the topics above I've given custom private talks about how SRE fits in with the engineering organization, metrics driven development, managing work in progress, migration to cloud, and more. Internal DevOpsDays are a specialty including participating in Open Spaces and meeting with primary stakeholders.
We'll sit down and have a conversation about the most appropriate topics to maximize the impact and value. More examples here.

Podcast Guest:

“Through a decade of work with Thoma Bravo portfolio companies, Dave has taught our product teams how to dramatically improve business outcomes and to discover where time comes from. He also taught us how to fly.”
Paul Zuber
Operating Partner and Head of the Technology Group

"As Dave mentions, private equity investors are serious people. This book will help the serious understand what goes wrong in R&D, and what they can do about it. I hope this helps encourage board directors to discuss R&D operating metrics with as much frequency and seriousness as they do sales and marketing operational metrics."
Gene Kim
Researcher and Bestselling Author of The Unicorn Project, The Phoenix Project, and the upcoming Wiring the Winning Organization

DevOps Patterns for Private Equity:
Technology organization strategies for high performing software investments

As many of the top Private Equity investors know, software companies can be a great investment. Whether as a platform with add-ons, or as a profitable company that needs help to “nail it and scale it”, there are many opportunities for great returns. But that doesn’t make it easy. With compressed time schedules, closely watched budgets, legacy software, and massive amounts of complexity, transforming these companies can be a challenge.In DevOps Patterns for Private Equity, I describe patterns that are common in technology organizations from the perspective of the international DevOps movement. By applying core principles, I give practical advice to mature these organizations and maximize the value of software investments. Using anecdotes, contrasting theory and practice, and focusing on business value, my hard learned lessons give private equity backed technology leaders patterns they can recognize, and approaches they can use, to transform their technology organizations for peak performance and value creation.