The rise of DCI: Why your DevOps pipeline isn’t enough for digital growth

DevOps has gone a long way towards helping companies ship faster and at scale. But while the practice has revolutionized how companies ship software, DevOps doesn't address what to build or why what you build matters to customers. 

Building fast doesn’t matter if you’re building the wrong thing. You need to understand what your customers want quickly and continuously, or you’ll end up losing them. 

To get those insights, you need to add another practice to the mix: Digital continuous innovation (DCI). 

Where DevOps focuses on breaking down silos, increasing automation, and shipping faster, DCI brings those same principles to the company at large. With democratized access to data and analytics, non-technical team members can own their areas of responsibility, analyze performance, and run their own experiments to improve results. 

DCI is fundamentally about empowering teams to identify new opportunities for improvement and seize those opportunities. These opportunities can be small (e.g., improving feature discovery by changing button placement) or dramatic (e.g., creating a new channel of engagement). 

Empowered teams need three fundamental things:

Once these elements are in place, DCI bridges the gap between strategic insight and execution, ensuring that the speed and reliability of DevOps translates into meaningful customer value and sustainable competitive advantage.

DevOps has transformed software delivery, making it faster, more automated, and more reliable. However, DevOps excels at delivery and automation without addressing whether teams are building features that customers actually want or need. This is the gap DCI fills—ensuring we focus not just on execution, but on building the right things in the first place. Together, the two practices create a fast and purposeful movement toward customer value. 

DevOps and DCI can also deliver value independently. For example, a product manager may make UX configuration changes via feature flags to deliver more value to customers with little or no code. Similarly, not all delivery execution needs new strategic thinking or objectives—for example, backend performance improvements or reducing cloud infrastructure costs.

Combining DevOps and DCI is valuable for companies of all sizes, but especially for enterprises fighting for a competitive edge. 

Combining DevOps and DCI allows companies to test ideas and ship features more quickly. “The longer it takes to test an idea, the greater the chance that a competitor ships faster or that you’ll invest significant resources in the wrong solution,” Mixpanel’s Chief Product Officer, Edward Hsu, explains. Supporting DevOps with DCI speeds up timelines significantly, he adds. “Instead of waiting months for a large project to conclude, teams can get actionable insights and ship improvements in days or weeks.”

When you combine DevOps with DCI, you also increase operational efficiency. DCI offers a streamlined path from observation to action: By giving teams access to self-serve platforms to observe, investigate, and analyze their own answers, it frees up time for both data analysts and dev teams. Instead of making updates and hoping for results, engineering efforts become hyper-focused on validated, high-impact opportunities.

Finally, combining DevOps with DCI fosters better alignment and cross-team collaboration. When product, marketing, and development teams work from different data sets, misalignment and friction are inevitable. DCI addresses this by establishing a common understanding of key business metrics and goals. It ensures everyone, from marketing and product to the executive team, is looking at the same numbers, defined in the same way. 

All of this sounds great in theory. Here’s what it looks like in practice. 

Continuous innovation is essential for companies to remain competitive. Workday executives confirm this in an interview with McKinsey, highlighting how the company’s strategic move to SaaS is amplified by a culture that relentlessly evolves the product based on customer needs. Workday achieves this by maintaining close vigilance on customer requirements, ensuring “each new product release is based on customer experience and usage analysis.”

ZipRecruiter, a leading job search site with over 25 million job seekers, initially faced challenges gaining quick insights from its SQL-based analytics for its data-heavy, A/B testing culture.

Adopting digital continuous innovation, their product teams gained a fast, easy-to-use solution for ad hoc analysis and A/B test tracking. This enabled them to successfully launch major features, redesign their homepage, and revamp search experiences, with dashboards set up in minutes. 

The shift significantly reduced time spent on SQL queries, accelerating their ability to make data-driven improvements.

“Without Mixpanel, I’d be pretty bogged down and frustrated, spending a lot more time writing and processing SQL queries. Now, I spend less time figuring out how to get the right data, and more time looking at it.”

Read the full case study to learn more. 

AI and DevOps already go hand in hand: AI tools like GitHub Copilot or Amazon CodeGuru are accelerating DevOps by increasing efficiency and automating key tasks. 

Just as AI tools are accelerating DevOps and creating new opportunities for developers, DCI in turn helps generate rich, structured data on user behavior, feature performance, and optimization outcomes that are invaluable for training AI models to detect patterns and predict future actions. AI-powered DevOps and DCI together create a landscape of new opportunities to create AI-driven digital experiences for both internal operations and users.  

Start complementing your DevOps with DCI today: Discover how Mixpanel's platform empowers teams to move fast and build the right things.

Try Mixpanel for free or read our DCI ebook to learn more.