DigitalOcean Innovation & Technology Culture

What tools support your day-to-day work?

We run the pillar systems you'd expect: finance, HR and CRM, plus Slack and Jira for collaboration. But unlike other companies, we're rethinking the whole stack. DigitalOcean’s own inference cloud, along with AI agents like Claude and Cursor increasingly sit between employees and their underlying systems as a personal interface layer. Any well-built tool becomes interchangeable at the experience layer, as long as it surfaces its data through granular APIs or MCP, because the employee's real interface is their agent.Employees working at DigitalOcean are uniquely positioned here. We already have the infrastructure expertise and engineering discipline to run our own stack, so we’re free to explore moving away from configuration-heavy SaaS toward open-source, API-first, agent-ready tools. For the employees we support, this means they have more control to define how our tools can work best for this. Through natural language prompting, skills to automate repetitive tasks and AI-assisted coding to help them build micro-apps, they are in the driver’s seat for how their work gets done.

How does your team experiment?

We experiment aggressively in a structured way. Before any tool or workflow reaches a wide audience, we pilot it with a smaller group on real work instead of a hypothetical test case. That lets us see how something actually performs in the flow of the business and it keeps the stakes low: if it doesn't earn its place, we've learned that cheaply and moved on. What matters as much as the pilot is what happens after rollout. We don't treat "shipped" as "done." We test and learn, pulling feedback directly from the teams using the tool, because the people doing the work are the ones who know whether it's actually making them faster or just adding a step. That feedback loop is what tells us to double down, adjust, or walk it back. The result is that adopting something new doesn't feel risky or top-down. People trust that we've tested it, that their input shapes it and that nothing gets forced on them just because it's new. That's what keeps the team willing to try the next thing.

How does your company adapt to change?

The clearest example is the work leading up to our Deploy conference earlier this year. It became clear from customer conversations and signals from the market that it was time to reposition DigitalOcean as an AI-Native, Agentic Inference Cloud, which was a bold shift from how we operated previously. Once the decision was made, the most striking part was how quickly everyone aligned. Teams across the company re-prioritized roadmaps and rowed in the same direction, even when that meant setting aside their own plans for the bigger goal. 

Adapting to a change that size isn't something one team can do alone. It works because people trust each other enough to move together, fast. The payoff was real: we shipped more products and features than ever before and meaningfully shifted the company's direction, both financially and technically. At DigitalOcean, we know that change is necessary and that this kind of growth mindset, paired with genuine collaboration, is what lets us do the best work of our careers.