2025-09-15 –, Bierstadt Lagerhaus Stage
Is your team reactive instead of proactive? Are they providing bespoke advice instead of scalable platforms? In this talk, we’ll go over when, why, and how to transition infra teams from consultants to product builders.
In smaller organizations, infrastructure or DevOps teams tend to act as consultants, reactively providing 1:1 support and customized solutions for the teams they work with. This works great when the number of teams to support is small and the organization is optimizing for agility. As organizations grow, this proves hard to scale. Teams need to transition to a model where they act more like a team building a product or platform to meet their users needs. Many infra teams at Datadog are in the middle of this transition and we can share some of our experiences along the way. In particular, we’ll talk about:
- When/why it may make sense to start such a transition
- What challenges we faced in making the transition
- What worked well, what we’re trying, and what we still haven’t figured out
Sean is the Director of Compute & Cloud at Datadog. His teams are responsible for managing tens of thousands of kubernetes nodes, hundreds of clusters, and the tooling to manage cloud resources across multiple providers.
Throughout his career Sean has walked the line between product and infra including running the Datastore infra team and APM product team at Datadog, running the Backend engineering and DevOps teams at Bitly, and helping build multiple early stage startups.
Sean is based in Denver, CO.