S1E5 - Sarah Wells on Cultural Change

Most engineering leaders think velocity problems are technology problems. They see slow deployments and assume the solution involves better CI/CD pipelines, more developers, or migrating to microservices. But as Sarah Wells discovered during her transformation of the Financial Times, the biggest constraints aren't in your codebase—they're in your org chart.

The FT's journey from 12 releases per year to over 20,000 wasn't primarily a technical achievement. It was an organizational one. Their Saturday deployments weren't happening because of architectural limitations; they were happening because of change advisory boards, separate QA teams, and decision-making processes that treated every release like a potential catastrophe.

"If you don't get those things right, you can't move fast," Wells explains. The shift to microservices enabled zero-downtime deployments, but the real breakthrough came from dismantling gatekeepers, empowering cross-functional teams, and recognizing a fundamental truth: velocity is a cultural and business issue, not a technical one.

In this episode of Velocity's Edge, Sarah and host Nicko Goncharoff explore why successful digital transformation requires organizational change alongside technical evolution. They tackle essential questions: How do you assess whether a company can make the cultural shifts required for velocity? What communication channels and forums do engineering teams actually need? How do you measure progress on transformation that goes beyond technology?

The conversation reveals why the fastest-moving organizations aren't necessarily those with the best technology stack—they're the ones that understand how to eliminate decision-making dependencies and build cultures that allow teams to move with autonomy.

Sarah Wells is a recognized leader in software engineering, with a focus on microservices, DevOps, and engineering enablement. A frequent speaker and the author of Enabling Microservices Success, Sarah brings extensive industry knowledge and hands-on experience in building high-performing engineering teams.

As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.