Modernizing Software Delivery

The fastest cars have the best brakes.

AI gave every team a bigger engine. Harness is the brakes they can trust.

Harness

Modernizing software deliveryat Meridian Freight.

A Harness Proposal - for the AI-velocity era.
Adam Bracey
Senior Sales Engineer Candidate
June 2026
The Customer

Meet Meridian Freight.

$2B
Logistics revenue. Mid-market by size, enterprise by complexity.
1,200
Engineers across three product lines. Growing.
AWS → multi-cloud
Single-cloud today. Board-mandated portability tomorrow.
9 mo
AI coding assistants rolled out org-wide. Code volume has never been higher.
We're not a slow engineering org - we're a scared engineering org.
- VP of Platform Engineering
Meridian Freight
The Customer Act 00 - Setup
The Shift

What changed this year

PR Volume
↑ 3×
Code Review Capacity
↑ 0×
Deploy Confidence
↓

AI made writing code cheap. It didn't make shipping it safe.

The bottleneck - and the risk - moved to everything after code. Act 00 - Setup
What We Heard

Three problems keeping Meridian up at night.

01
Release risk
Monthly Friday-night deploys. Last failed deploy took 38 engineers across a weekend.
→Ship AI-generated change without fear
02
Tool sprawl
6 engineers full-time maintaining Jenkins + ArgoCD + glue. Team grew 40% last year. Feature velocity didn't.
→Platform team becomes a force multiplier
03
Cloud lock-in
Board approved multi-cloud. Pipeline rewrite estimated at 18 months.
→Cloud is a strategic option, not an 18-month project
What We Heard Act 00 - Setup
Act One

01/Release Risk

From scared engineering to safe engineering.
01 / 03
The Capability Meridian Needs

Every deploy should be low-risk and self-healing - especially the ones a machine wrote. Safety is the unlock for speed.

Release Risk Act 01 - The need
Live Demo Act 01 · Release Risk

Canary + Continuous Verification + Auto-Rollback.

Continuous Delivery AI SRE Resilience
01An AI-generated change, deployed as a canary.
02Real-time metric analysis - Prometheus / Datadog / Dynatrace.
03Auto-rollback on regression - no runbook, no 2am page.
Now the demo
Release Risk Act 01 - Live Demonstration
The Delta
Before Harness

Monthly Friday-night deploys. 38 engineers across a weekend to recover from one failure.

With Harness

Daily mid-day deploys. Rollback in 90 seconds. No one pages at 2am.

"Release velocity up 20×. MTTR down to minutes."

What Meridian's CEO Actually Hears

The tracking product ships features 3× faster - because the cost of a bad deploy went from "lost weekend" to "auto-resolved."

Release Risk Act 01 - Value delivered
Act Two

02/Tool Sprawl

From cost center to force multiplier.
02 / 03
The Capability Meridian Needs

One platform. CI, CD, secrets, approvals, governance - native, not integrated.

Tool Sprawl Act 02 - The need
Live Demo Act 02 · Tool Sprawl

Unified pipelines, templates + governance - built with Harness AI.

CI CD & GitOps Internal Dev Portal Artifact Registry
01One platform, one RBAC model, one audit trail.
02Templates = governance at scale.
03Describe a change in plain English - Harness AI builds the pipeline step; I approve it.
Now the demo
Tool Sprawl Act 02 - Live Demonstration
The Delta
Before Harness

6 engineers maintaining Jenkins + ArgoCD + Vault + ServiceNow + Snyk + glue.

With Harness

One platform. One RBAC model. One audit trail. Governance at scale.

"Platform team down from 6 pipeline-maintainers to 2."

What Meridian's CEO Actually Hears

4 engineers redirected to internal developer platform. New-service-to-prod drops from 4 weeks to 4 days.

Tool Sprawl Act 02 - Value delivered
Act Three

03/Cloud Lock-In

Pipelines that survive infrastructure decisions.
03 / 03
The Capability Meridian Needs

Pipelines must be portable across infrastructure. Cloud decisions shouldn't be CI/CD rewrites.

Cloud Lock-In Act 03 - The need
Live Demo Act 03 · Cloud Lock-In

Service / environment / execution separation.

Continuous Delivery Infrastructure as Code
01Service - what we're deploying.
02Environment - where we're deploying.
03Execution - how we're deploying.
→Swap infrastructure without rewriting pipelines.
Now the demo
Cloud Lock-In Act 03 - Live Demonstration
The Delta
Before Harness

18 months of pipeline rewrites blocking the board-approved GCP migration.

With Harness

Same pipelines. Swap the infrastructure definition. Weeks, not months.

"Pipelines decoupled from infrastructure decisions."

What Meridian's CEO Actually Hears

Multi-cloud becomes a strategic option, not a CI/CD project. Every future infrastructure bet is zero-cost to delivery.

Cloud Lock-In Act 03 - Value delivered
The After State

What Meridian's CEO actually cares about.

01
Release Risk
Tracking product ships 3× faster.
CD AI SRE Resilience
02
Tool Sprawl
Platform team becomes a force multiplier.
CI CD IDP Artifact
03
Cloud Lock-In
Multi-cloud becomes a strategic option, not a project.
CD IaC
Positive Business Outcomes - Tied to Executive Priorities Closing
The Next Conversation

"The call we're having next week isn't
'should we buy.'

It's 'how fast can we
onboard the first three teams.'"

Questions welcome.
Adam Bracey - Senior SE Candidate One More Thing →
flagship™ 2026 The 6th Edition
The Feature Management and Experimentation Summit

Release Fearlessly at AI Speed

June 17, 2026 · Virtual · 10:00am PT and 10:00am CET
Register Now
harness.io/event/flagship
Adam Bracey - Senior SE Candidate Flagship 2026