Pivoting Under Pressure - Rethinking the OSPO Identity

OSPOs in 2026 are facing a Seldon-crisis. With current trends in the face of “macroeconomic conditions”, and organizations pushing for the broader adoption of AI, many OSPOs have found themselves among the first groups to have their resources and headcount constrained, if not removed, and suddenly having to pivot to support organizational goals they’ve never considered before.

Things like compliance and security in the face of the GenAI landscape, SBOMs for models and data, pressure to build and integrate tooling to improve developer velocity, and much more.

To adapt, and even thrive, in the face of these challenges, Richard and Bob propose a new way of thinking about the identity of an OSPO and look to introduce a 4-principle framework to aid you in repositioning your OSPO as a resilient and vital part of your organization.

Transcript

1. Pivoting Under Pressure Rethinking the OSPO Identity
2. Richard Sikang Bian • Product & Growth, Ant Ling & InclusionAI @ ANT Group • Previously Director of Strategy and Growth @ ANT Group OSPO Could not be here :(
3. • Currently TPgM @ CNCF • Previously PgM @ Google’s OSPO • Previously Academia (16 years) • Emeritus Kubernetes Steering Committee Member & former SIG Contributor Experience Chair Bob Killen 👋 Hi. Contact info: bkillen@linuxfoundation.org GitHub: @mrbobbytables bsky: @mrbobbytabl.es Site: mrbobbytabl.es Corporate Contributor Maintainer Hobby Contributor End User
4. State of OSPOs in 2026
5. State of OSPOs in 2026 …Reorged
6. State of OSPOs in 2026 …Reorged …Downsized
7. State of OSPOs in 2026 …Reorged …Downsized Forced to become marketing, event or AI focused … 🫠
8. OSPOs are (frequently) not business aligned. Problem:
9. What does business aligned actually mean?
10. The Pivot - High Level Strategy
11. The Plan • What matters to your organization? • What are your goals? • How healthy are the projects that you use? • What resources do you have? • Tracking & framing impact
12. Priority = Criticality x Health Prioritizing investments (Business Risk & Opportunities)
13. What (software) matter to your organization What are you using? • A full software inventory is more essential with growth in supply chain attacks (who doesn’t just love~ doing a full software inventory) How critical is it to your stack or product? • How difficult would it be to switch to something else? Or fork and maintain it? • Are there features that are important to you being developed? If it went in another direction, how much would it impact you? Example Criticality Levels High (30) • Critical to core business function • Extremely difficult to swap or maintain internally • Difficult to backfill expertise • Roadmap has features that would be very beneficial to org Moderate (20) • Software that supports core functionality • Could be swapped out with reasonable effort • Easy to backfill expertise Low (10) • Non-essential tools/apps with minimal business impact • Could be swapped out with minimal effort (API compatible)
14. Description Questions Organization Dependency How critical is the project to your organization? • Critical: Core component to business function or initiative. • Operational: Supportive to critical; does not disrupt core business function. • Administrative: Provides a useful function such as automation, but has no direct impact on business function. • What are downstream impacts? projects, products, services, or teams • How difficult would it be to switch to something else? Or fork and maintain internally? And what would that cost be? • What would the impact of an unplanned security event be? Development Opportunities What opportunities are there to drive or impact the roadmap of the project to better suit business needs? • Does the project currently have features or initiatives that would be beneficial? If yes, how so? • Could development create a competitive advantage? Supportability How difficult is the project to support? • How easy is it to support? Is it well documented? • How difficult is it skill-up employees or backfill on expertise? Cost Management How does the project help with managing costs? • Does the project help you reduce or manage costs? (e.g. right-sizing pods) If so, by what factor? • Would using the project and committing resources to it be a better option than a vendored option? • Does using the project enable you to pick from multiple solutions? Brand Affiliation & Marketing How important is it to be associated with the project? • Do we want to be seen as leaders in this space? Or strongly associated with it? • Are there specific outlets or demographics we want to reach? How can we measure reach? Ecosystem Potential Does the project create or support an ecosystem that is important to the business? • Do we have the resources to capitalize on creating an ecosystem? • What kind of benefit would it bring our projects, products, or services?
15. How healthy are the projects that you use? Quality codebase Responsive to issues / PRs Healthy Contributor Diversity Has goals and a roadmap Quality documentation for both users & contributors Good security and releasing controls What is a healthy project?
16. How healthy are the projects that you use? Quality codebase Sound architectural design, static code analysis, sufficient testing Responsive to issues / PRs Time to first response / review Healthy Contributor Diversity No single vendor drives the whole project Has goals and a roadmap They are planning, and have a design review process Quality documentation for both users & contributors Docs are critical for both adoption and contributor growth Good security and releasing controls Do they have a history of triaging and resolving security issues, are they using/investigating supply chain security best practices What is a healthy project?
17. Key Projects
18. Key Projects Ecosystem Influence Non-code collaboration activities (group membership, meetings, events etc.) Technical Influence code activities (commits, PRs etc.) Health Unified metric that reflects overall health of project. Health Score Explained: https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/docs/metrics/health-score/
19. Key Projects Ecosystem Influence Non-code collaboration activities (group membership, meetings, events etc.) Technical Influence code activities (commits, PRs etc.) Health Unified metric that reflects overall health of project. Export CSV Can be integrated/augmented with internal data
20. Priorities Project Org Dependency Project Opportunities Supportability Health (risk) Foo (28) • Score: 10 • Critical to core business function • Migrating to an alternative would be extremely difficult • Score: 7 • Roadmap has very useful features • High barrier of entry to contribute and will require more time to engage • Score: 8 • Extremely difficult to backfill expertise • Not well documented internally • Score: 1 (Excellent) • Project has a large contributor base, but few senior maintainers • Contributor ladder needs work Bar (24) • Score: 6 • Not critical to business function • Score: 9 • Project is a better option than <Baz> and easy to drive features • Popular, strong marketing opportunity to be associated with it • Score: 6 • Easy to backfill expertise • Could be swapped out with reasonable effort • Score: 4 (Unsteady) • Project is down to 3 active maintainer, but larger contributor base 36-45 Critical 27-35 High 18-26 Moderate 9-17 Low 0-8 Negligible
21. What resources do you have? Organizations have much more than just Software Engineers that can help projects. They also need people with these skills: • Triage & Program/Product Management • Tech Writing • Communications & Marketing • Event Management
22. Priority = Criticality + Health Putting it together How healthy is the project? Does it need support? How much do we depend on it? What opportunities are there for us in the project? How does it fit into an overall strategy? Number to help you prioritize where you have the largest potential business impact. Resources you have available
23. Metrics & KPIs Deck
24. CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Demonstrating Organizational Value Chasing the White Whale of Open Source - ROI https://mrbobbytabl.es/talk/2024/11/chasing-the-white-whale-of-open-source-roi/ https://chaoss.community/practitioner-guide-demonstrating-org-value/
25. What resources do YOU have? What resources do you as an OSPO can provide?
26. Toil Reduction
27. AI: beyond code generation
28. AI assisted triage • Reduced software engineer time spent on triage • Decreased time to first response, time to resolve • De-risk usage of project by improving overall project health • Introduces better data to answer questions & track trends KPIs • Decreased time spent on triage • Decreased time to first response • Decreased overall issue/PR open time Long Term Health KPIs • Increased contributor engagement: unique #, frequency, retention • Increased contributor velocity • Positive sentiment on issues/PRs and other communication channels
29. Support Requests • Reduced software engineer time spent on answering questions • Surface broader issues that may not be seen by single engineer • Expose blind spots in documentation KPIs • Decreased time spent on answering support requests • Decreased time to first response • Decreased time to answer Long Term Health KPIs • Increased user engagement • Increased adoption/growth • Positive sentiment on issues/PRs and other communication channels
30. Dosu Project focused “knowledge” system that can: - Automates triage - Answers support requests - Improve documentation by surfacing gaps and automatic updating - Answer code related questions
31. Bluefin - Early 2025 50K Weekly Active Users 60K Systems Checking In daily 30M+ Container Image Pulls 2PB Data Served via Installs 3 Maintainers 25K Discord Members 139 Repositories 42H Average Response Time
32. 42 Hours to first response 12 Minutes to first response 52% of conversations received an AI-assisted response. Bluefin & Dosu Late 2025
33. Documentation is still king “84% of developers use technical documentation for learning. Of those, 90% rely on documentation found in API and SDK packages.” source: Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey Report “We started to look at documentation in 2021, and every year we continue to find extensive impact of quality documentation. “ source: Google Accelerate State of DevOps 2024 “Teams with higher quality documentation are 2.4 times more likely to see better software delivery and operational (SDO) performance.” Source: Google Accelerate State of DevOps 2021
34. Quality and authoritative documentation is crucial for general SEO and designing with LLMs in mind.
35. This feature enables mutating spec.completions for Indexed job if spec.completions equals to spec.parallelism before and after the update, meaning that spec.completions is mutable only in tandem with spec.parallelism. Example - Jargon to readable Prompt (gemini): Using the official kubernetes documentation as a reference, rewrite this feature description to be more user-friendly.
36. This feature enables mutating spec.completions for Indexed job if spec.completions equals to spec.parallelism before and after the update, meaning that spec.completions is mutable only in tandem with spec.parallelism. This feature allows you to scale Indexed Jobs by updating completions and parallelism together. It’s designed for parallel workloads that require the number of workers to always match the total number of tasks. Prompt (gemini): Using the official kubernetes documentation as a reference, rewrite this feature description to be more user-friendly. Example - Jargon to readable
37. This feature introduces an automatic topology aware hinting mechanism that would provide a way for EndpointSlice producers to indicate where consumers should use specific endpoints. Example - Targeting a specific audience Prompt (gemini): Using the official kubernetes documentation as a reference, rewrite this feature description to target a cluster administrator.
38. This feature introduces an automatic topology aware hinting mechanism that would provide a way for EndpointSlice producers to indicate where consumers should use specific endpoints. This feature enables Topology Aware Hints, an automated mechanism to optimize cross-zone traffic. By annotating a Service, the EndpointSlice controller injects routing hints into the data plane, directing kube-proxy to prioritize zone-local endpoints. This effectively reduces inter-zone egress costs and minimizes network latency across the cluster. Prompt (gemini): Using the official kubernetes documentation as a reference, rewrite this feature description to target a cluster administrator. Example - Targeting a specific audience
39. Open Issue Issue template has section to provide details on change made, and links to supporting material/issues. Assign to Copilot Assign to Copilot Ensure AGENTS.md has context on the project, what sources to use as a reference etc. Revise PR Review copilot PR, add any sections that are needed. AI Localization Changed files provided to service for localization and copilot opens related PRs. Revise PR Merge PR Docs update on merged PR triggers localization workflow Translation Review Native speakers can review localized PRs or if not available, merged directly. Copilot
40. Documentation • Better developer experience • Increases ability to self-service / decreased engineering time • De-risk usage of project by improving overall project health KPIs • Decreased support questions opened • Increased site traffic & accompanying site metrics • Increase in LLM hits Long Term Health KPIs • Increased new contributor engagement & retention • Positive sentiment on issues/PRs
41. A lot more to cover Hiring & retention… Knowledge transfer… Managing changing priorities… Divesting from a project without impacting it… Chasing the White Whale of Open Source - ROI CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Demonstrating Organizational Value