I’m pretty early in my career – 20 years old, just getting started in DevOps and systems engineering. But one thing that’s already becoming obvious is this:
Most businesses don’t realise how much they rely on tech… until it breaks.
A while ago, a colleague I really respect recommended I read The Phoenix Project. I figured it’d be useful for picking up a few lessons on IT ops, maybe a bit of DevOps theory. But it actually gave me something way more valuable – a new way of thinking about how businesses work.
And why so many of them get blindsided when tech becomes the bottleneck.
The Book That Taught Me More Than Some Courses
The Phoenix Project is written as a novel, which threw me at first. You follow this guy named Bill who’s suddenly put in charge of fixing a massive IT project that’s crashing and burning. Think outages, missed deadlines, execs freaking out – total chaos.
What stuck with me wasn’t the firefighting though. It was how the entire company depended on tech – but no one really saw it that way.
HR couldn’t hire.
Finance couldn’t run payroll.
Marketing couldn’t launch campaigns.
Sales had no clue what was going on.
And the root of the problem wasn’t just bad code or buggy systems – it was the fact that no one saw how connected everything was.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with a business owner recently. He said, “We’re not really a tech company.” Meanwhile, his entire customer experience – from ads to payments to support – was powered by tech.
That’s when it hit me:
You don’t have to sell tech to be a tech company.
If your operations depend on it, you already are.
DevOps Isn’t Just a Buzzword
Before reading this book, DevOps felt like a bunch of buzzwords – CI/CD, Docker, pipelines, containers, infrastructure-as-code. Cool stuff, but kind of abstract.
What The Phoenix Project showed me is that DevOps is really about making work visible, breaking down silos, and getting things flowing again. Not just in tech teams – across the whole business.
It’s about trust, speed, and reducing friction between people who are trying to do good work. And that applies whether you’re managing servers or shipping coffee.
Why This Matters (Even if You’re Not in Tech)
If you run a business or lead a team – and you’ve ever said, “IT is slowing us down” – you should absolutely read this book.
Because it might not be “IT” that’s the problem.
It might be that the business hasn’t caught up to how tech is now part of everything.
Tech isn’t just a department anymore. It’s the engine. The bloodstream. The infrastructure that makes or breaks trust.
And that’s not something I learned in a course.
That’s something I learned from reading a story.
📖 The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford
Highly recommend it. Especially if you’ve never thought of yourself as a “tech person,” but your business depends on tech more than you realise.
If you’re into this kind of thing; DevOps, systems, and how tech fits into the bigger business picture – I’m always sharing more on my blog – willemnekker.com/blog.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Always keen to meet people building cool stuff or figuring it out like I am.