Tchibo — Selling Flux to Your Organization

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

Session Date: March 25, 2026 — London

The Challenge

"We don't know what you are doing and why"
— Management's feedback to the platform team

Management wanted a short presentation on what the team does. The team realized they needed to sell their technical vision or lose relevance.

One Last Dance

  • A final attempt to place technical vision in the right places
  • The team decided to become visible and impactful — or accept failure
  • Starting with "why" is how you sell (Simon Sinek framework)

The 5-Step Framework

  1. Be Visible — have presence so people know you exist
  2. Talk to People — meet stakeholders, listen, don't say anything at first
  3. Make Values Measurable — numbers in business context
  4. Create Narratives — storytelling with "start with why"
  5. Make People Feel Hidden Pain — expose problems they don't know they have

Play the Music

Showing people musical notes means nothing if they can't hear the music.

  • Developers say they don't have problems — they don't know it could be better
  • "Infect people with problems they didn't know they had"
  • Start showing the notes, then play the music

DORA Metrics — The Business Language

  • Used DORA metrics to fill the measurement gap
    • Deployment Frequency
    • Lead Time for Changes
    • Change Failure Rate
    • Mean Time to Recovery
  • Ran a pilot team using Flux to collect baseline numbers
  • Presented improvement to management in business terms

Why Flux Instead of Argo?

"It was a better fit back then."

  • Flux's declarative reconciliation is easier to visualize and explain
  • Continuous reconciliation makes drift immediately visible
  • Aligns with the goal of making hidden pain felt

AI and Junior Development

Q: In the age of AI, how do you develop juniors?

  1. Motivation — expose them to manual deployment pain first
  2. Exposure — pair with experienced devs on real problems

AI writes boilerplate; humans teach judgment.

Key Takeaways

  1. Visibility is survival — invisible teams get defunded
  2. Start with "why" — not what you built, but why it matters
  3. DORA metrics translate technical value to business language
  4. Pilot first — get numbers from a real team before scaling
  5. Listen before you speak — understand stakeholder problems first

Questions?

KubeCon EU 2026 — London