Someone told me that the power of feedback loops they first noticed not in a data center, but in a casino.
Drop a coin into a slot machine, pull the lever, and within seconds, the outcome is clear – no quarterly reports, no six-week review cycles – just unfiltered immediate feedback.
And that’s the hook. People come back, not because they love slot machines, but because the feedback is fast, clear, and addictive.
Now compare that to how most companies used to build software. Developers would spend weeks writing code, testers would scramble, operations would patch things together, and the “jackpot moment” – release day – came maybe weekly, if you were lucky.
Slow feedback, fuzzy signals, and lots of hidden costs.
CI/CD pipelines flipped the script. They turned software delivery into a slot machine with a purpose: short, fast feedback loops that tell you if your “bet” (a new feature, a bug fix, a config change) is winning or failing.
The Real Value: Buying Better Feedback Loops
If you strip away the jargon, a CI/CD pipeline is a company’s investment in high-frequency truth.
- Every commit is tested, so you don’t carry silent defects.
- Every build is scanned, so you don’t ship vulnerabilities in the dark.
- Every deployment is observable, so you don’t lose hours guessing what went wrong.
The value isn’t just “automation” or “speed.” The value is that you get to learn cheaply and quickly. A bad change costs you minutes to detect, not millions in downtime.
That’s not obvious until you flip it around: slow pipelines are expensive not because they take longer, but because they delay the truth.
How to Quantify the Value of Faster Truth
Most teams stop at DORA metrics. But the deeper story is what those metrics prevent or unlock. For example:
- Every hour of outage avoided = saved revenue.
- Every bug caught in pre-production = 10x cheaper.
- Every deployment sped up = faster bets on the market.
- Developer retention = hidden ROI.
And, for this very last counterintuitive one – turns of turns, it turns out that engineers who get feedback in minutes instead of days are much less likely to rage-quit.
These are not pipeline stats. They’re business truths delivered faster.
The Hidden Story: Who Really Benefits?
Here’s where it gets surprising. The biggest winners of great pipelines aren’t always developers.
- Customer support: fewer inbound tickets because bugs don’t linger.
- Sales: they can promise delivery timelines that actually stick.
- Compliance: evidence is auto-generated instead of manually hunted down.
- Security: they didn’t hire the pipeline to “shift left.” They hired it to sleep through the night without breach nightmares.
When you ask, “Who hired this pipeline, and for what job?”, the answers extend far beyond engineering.
The Danger of “Pipelines as Plumbing”
Too many companies undersell CI/CD as “just engineering plumbing.” But calling CI/CD “just plumbing” is like calling a casino’s payout system “just accounting.” The magic isn’t in the pipes – it’s in how fast the truth travels through them.
Nobody buys electricity for the wires – they buy it for the light, the heat, the productivity it enables. Similarly, companies don’t buy pipelines for automation. They buy them for the confidence to move fast without breaking everything.
The surprise is this: CI/CD is less about pushing code faster and more about shrinking the cost of being wrong. That’s the line you can carry into any boardroom.
Taking The Next Spin
Next time you look at your pipeline dashboard, don’t ask “how fast is it?” Ask:
- How quickly are we learning?
- How much money are we saving by catching errors earlier?
- Whose job across the business just got easier because of this signal?
That’s the story worth telling. Because at the end of the day, companies don’t hire pipelines to automate builds. They hire them for the same reason gamblers love slot machines: the feedback comes fast, and the truth is unmistakable.
Unlike Vegas, this is one bet where the house wants you to win. Every pull of the deployment lever either pays out in learning or ships value. And the best part? The odds keep getting better.