Jack sits down with Tapan Patel, Gearset DevOps Leader for 2026 and DevOps Lead for the Salesforce practice at Braze, a publicly traded omnichannel platform where every change management decision is subject to SOX audit scrutiny. 

Tapan brings a rare blend of project delivery experience, release management rigour, and genuine passion for building DevOps not just as a set of processes, but as a culture.

The episode is a masterclass in phased, people-first DevOps rollout. Tapan walks through exactly how he's taken Braze from change sets and manual deployments to a governed, audit-ready CI/CD pipeline over the past year and a half — breaking it down into four distinct phases and sharing what actually worked, what took longer than expected, and where he's headed next. Tapan shares his rounded take on AI, including where it's already adding value in the pipeline today, why agentic autonomy in prod is still a way off, and how Claude, Jira and Gearset's reporting API are becoming a powerful combination for DevOps KPI tracking.

00:01 – Intro & Meet Tapan Patel
00:40 – Tapan's Journey: From Data & Analytics to Salesforce DevOps
02:12 – What DevOps Actually Means as an Organisational Culture
04:10 – DevOps in a SOX-Audited, Publicly Traded Company
05:10 – The State of DevOps at Braze When Tapan Joined
08:14 – Shifting Mindsets From Change Sets to a DevOps Tool
10:32 – Precision Deployments: Why Page Layouts Break Everything
11:49 – Stakeholder Visibility & the Value of Issue Tracking Integration
13:36 – What Tapan Values Most About Gearset
15:53 – The Four Phases of CI/CD Rollout at Braze
19:16 – Phase Two: Stabilisation & SOX Integration
20:30 – Phase Three: Automation Layers & QA Integration
21:18 – Phase Four: Maturity & Minimal Intervention
22:55 – The Admin Learning Curve for DevOps Adoption
25:25 – Continuous Improvement as a Practice, Not a Project
28:34 – Where AI Fits Into the DevOps Pipeline Right Now
31:07 – Supplementary vs. Agentic AI: Why Tapan Is Taking It Slow
33:14 – Using Claude + Gearset Data for Sprint Analysis & KPI Tracking
36:00 – The DevOps KPIs That Matter at Braze
37:24 – Closing Advice for Anyone Starting Their DevOps Journey