A European telecom
Apr 2024 - Feb 2025 · Telecom
30% faster releases
60% faster detection
Releasing had become an event people braced for.
The situation
Engineering teams shipping to millions of customers. Every release was a scheduled occasion - work sat in long-lived branches waiting for a window, and when something broke afterwards in an estate that was half cloud and half on-premise, nobody could say quickly which half.
What was actually wrong
Not the engineers. The process rewarded batching up risk until it was too big to reason about, and monitoring told two different stories depending on which side of the infrastructure you asked. Both problems looked like culture. Both were plumbing.
What I built
An enterprise-wide GitLab transformation onto trunk-based development, so small changes went out continuously instead of large ones going out rarely - and a single monitoring layer that covered cloud and on-premise as one picture.
What changed
Releases got 30% faster and incidents were detected 60% sooner. The numbers are the part you can put on a slide. The part that mattered more is that releasing stopped being something anyone had to be brave about.