The 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: Hatica’s Take on Building Successful Engineering Teams in 2025!

Every year, the Accelerate State of DevOps Report brings clarity to the world of software delivery and operations. The 2024 edition does more than just highlight best practices—it reveals critical tensions that engineering leaders must navigate in their pursuit of excellence. This year, themes like AI adoption, platform engineering, and team dynamics stand out, but they’re not without their intrinsic complexities.

Here’s our take on this year’s findings and what they mean for your engineering teams.

AI: The Star That Might Shine Too Bright

AI is the star of the show this year, promising productivity boosts, better code quality, and fewer headaches. Sounds great, right? But here’s where it gets interesting: while AI makes tasks faster, it doesn’t always make them better.

According to the report, 81% of organizations prioritize AI integration, and developers using AI report increased productivity, enhanced flow, and greater satisfaction. However, paradoxically, it reduces the time engineers spend on tasks they consider “valuable.”

Why? Because AI, for all its efficiency, doesn’t replace the human impact of meaningful tasks—it merely expedites them, leaving behind an odd vacuum. Teams may finish faster but feel unfulfilled, stuck in toilsome work AI can’t fix, like endless meetings or administrative tasks.

This means that AI isn’t stealing satisfaction—it’s creating a vacuum. Unless we fill that void with work that feels meaningful, we risk building teams that are efficient but disengaged. That’s not the future any of us want to lead.

The Four Metrics: Still the Compass, But Not the Map

Change lead time. Deployment frequency. Change failure rate. Recovery time. These aren’t new metrics, but the way we interpret them might need a refresh.

The report highlights that elite performers deliver software 127 times faster and recover from failures 8 times quicker than their lower-performing counterparts. These are incredible benchmarks, but the real insight lies in the journey—not just the numbers.

Image source: 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

It’s tempting to chase these metrics blindly, but they’re only meaningful when applied in your team’s unique context.

The nuance? Your engineering team doesn’t need to be "elite" to be exceptional—they just need to be better than they were yesterday. While you go on to measure the engineering team’s performance, it is advisable to have full context into the team strength, work culture, team dynamics, priorities set at the beginning of a sprint or a quarter, customer promises made and an ecosystem in which your team continues to strive and thrive. 

Platform Engineering: The Silent Force That Can Go Too Far

Internal developer platforms are all the rage, and for good reason. Teams using them report an 8% boost in productivity and a 10% jump in performance. These platforms simplify workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and reduce friction.

Image source: 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

Sometimes, the more a platform tries to simplify, the more complexity it can accidentally introduce. Every automation, every handoff, and every layer of abstraction is an opportunity for bottlenecks to sneak in. Instead of liberating engineering teams, poorly implemented platforms can feel like golden cages—polished but confining.

The lesson here? A good platform is invisible. If your engineers notice it too much, it’s probably doing more harm than good.

Leadership and Stability

One finding that hit me personally was the impact of stable priorities. Engineering teams with clear, consistent goals were not only more productive but also far less burned out.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine asking your team to sprint in different directions every quarter. How far do they actually get? Now picture them sprinting toward a single, steady goal. That’s the difference stability makes.

The report also highlights the power of leadership—not the flashy, rah-rah kind, but the quiet, intentional kind that builds trust. A leader’s job isn’t to steer the ship with dramatic turns; it’s to make sure the ship’s compass is calibrated and the crew knows where they’re headed.

What This Means for You and Your Engineering Team

The 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps report isn’t a how-to guide—it’s a conversation starter.

Here are the questions I’m asking myself after reading it:

• Are we using AI to improve, not just expedite, our work?

• Do our metrics reflect what actually matters to our engineering team and organization?

• Is our platform making life easier, or just more convoluted?

• Am I giving my engineering team the clarity and stability they need to thrive?

Final Thoughts: Balancing the Grey Areas

If there’s one takeaway from this year’s report, it’s that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for high performance. The beauty—and the challenge—of engineering leadership lies in navigating the grey areas.

It’s about striking the right balance: velocity vs. quality, innovation vs. stability, automation vs. meaning. The best teams—and the best leaders—don’t aim for perfection. They aim for progress, knowing that the journey will always be a mix of wins, setbacks, and lessons.

So, what’s your next step? How will you apply these findings to make your engineering team not just productive, but proud of the work they do?

Let’s figure it out—together.