No, separate groups. We basically have four separate, less-technical groups that are all involved in some way with the process of releasing stuff, and they all have their own motivations and whatnot:

• PM - evaluated on consistency of releases, and keeping costs in line with expectations
• PO - evaluated on delivering features customers want, and engagement with those features
• QA - evaluated on bugs in production vs caught before release
• support - evaluated on time to resolve customer complaints
• devs - evaluated on reliability of estimates and consistency of work

PM, PO, and QA are involved in feature releases, PM, QA, and support are involved in hotfixes. Each tests in a staging environment before signing off, and tests again just after deploy.

It seems to work pretty well, and as a lead dev, I only need to interact with those groups at release and planning time. If I do my job properly, they’re all happy and releases are smooth (and they usually are). Each group has caught important issues, so I don’t think the redundancy is waste. The only overlap we have is our support lead has started contributing code changes (they cross-trained to FE dev), so they have another support member fill in when there’s a conflict of interest.

My industry has a pretty high cost for bad releases, since a high severity bug could cost customers millions per day, kind of like CrowdStrike, so I must assume they have a similar process for releases.