Session Description
Even the best DevOps teams hit slowdowns: rising incidents, unclear ownership, decision bottlenecks, and frustrated engineers. But the root cause is rarely the tools or the tech. It’s the leadership patterns shaping how teams communicate, align, and make decisions under pressure.
In this talk, I’ll share the real organizational failure modes I’ve seen across 20+ years of leading distributed engineering orgs, including scaling Compute at DigitalOcean. We’ll unpack why hero culture, architectural ambiguity, and tactical management quietly break DevOps, and what high-performing teams do differently.
Attendees will walk away with practical, lightweight frameworks to improve decision velocity, reduce cognitive load, and create the alignment needed to scale reliable systems without burning out their people.
Speaker
Engineering Leadership & Decision-Making Expert • Former Director of Engineering at DigitalOcean
Limor Bergman Gross is a former Director of Engineering at DigitalOcean, where she scaled the Compute engineering organization, improved system reliability, and led cross-functional architectural strategy across distributed teams. With more than 20 years in tech, she has built and mentored high-performing engineering managers, platform teams, and infrastructure groups.
Today, Limor is an executive leadership coach focused on helping technical leaders strengthen their decision-making, communication, and strategic influence. She works with engineering managers, directors, and staff engineers to move beyond tactical execution and lead with clarity and confidence.
Limor brings a rare blend of deep technical experience, practical leadership frameworks, and empathy for the real challenges engineering teams face. She speaks frequently about technical leadership, Engineering culture, and the human patterns behind scalable systems.
