What are the typical signs and signals of a DevOps team being understaffed? How would you justify/explain a request for a new addition to a team? I would love to keep the question generic, but here is some additional information: We currently have 2 DevOps specialists working together as a team, but the demands and the amount and complexity of products are growing. We are thinking to request a new addition to the team, but having some difficulties explaining and proving why it would be a good idea.

The comparison of a software delivery team to a football team (all can kick the ball but only some will become an excellent goalkeeper or a forward) can be a nice input for further thought regarding division of labour and specialists vs. generalists. So, it seems more to me than just "you should never try to hire a DevOps team" - because if you hire "a football team" you do not just want "somebody kick the ball in the FIFA World Cup", but you possibly want to have an idea what makes the team having chances to win. So, winning teams can be a product themselves (can't find the reference for that but there are enough startup acquisions, I'm sure it is not always just about the product) - what is the recipe for success? For sure there is a lot of soft skills/cultural related context, but this would be true for virtually every team. What are mandatory DevOps specific requirements to skill sets for a winning team setup? Will be there a relationship between numbers of CI/CD experts and those who focus on development, or operations? Note: this question is not a duplicate of "why you shouldn't try to hire a DevOps Engineer" as a specific question is after required skills setup. E.g. would you have a CI-focused profile or expect developers to include pipelines as code to their projects? Clearly, just hiring somebody with the DevOps claim does not answer this question.