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Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms

Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms

Traditionally teams and groups are incentivized for outputs, so the more cycles you can run and the faster you can close requests the better. We end up optimizing internal processes at the cost of company outcomes. I posit that, ultimately, this happens because teams don’t see each other as customers.

You might be thinking “But they’re not our customers, they’re our colleagues!”. Also true. This talk will explore how every team and every division in an organization can adopt a platform mindset, in which they treat what they offer to other teams as an internal product.

While we have made great strides in the last decade to break down silos in Engineering, in most organizations when you look outside there is still an abyss between teams sitting in different divisions in the organization. This can significantly slow down the flow of value to our customers, directly and indirectly.

You’ve likely experienced at least one of these in your professional career… Not being allowed to use the right tool for the job because of a strict procurement process. Spending half a day to get a 20€ expense approved and reimbursed. Or a much-anticipated employee onboarding portal that ends up being just a UI on top of the 73 steps and 14 approvals required to set up an employee workstation.

None of this happens in bad faith. It just turns out that traditionally teams and groups are incentivized for outputs, so the more cycles you can run and the faster you can close requests the better. We end up optimizing internal processes at the cost of company outcomes.

I posit that, ultimately, this happens because teams don’t see each other as customers. You might be thinking “But they’re not our customers, they’re our colleagues!”. Also true. The key here is that every team, every division in an organization can adopt a platform mindset in which they treat what they offer to other teams as an internal product.

That means other teams become your customers. Certainly there are particular dynamics at play when your customers are your peers as well but fundamentally the core principles of the “platform as a product” approach translate well across the organization.

We have seen this work well inside engineering, and we have started to see it in other domains of the business as well: Data science and business intelligence, but also leadership, marketing, legal, HR, etc. We will cover some early examples during this talk and think ahead to what the future holds for platforms beyond engineering.

Manuel Pais

April 17, 2024
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  1. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms Manuel Pais

    co-author of Team Topologies DevOpsDays Zurich 2024 - 17 Apr 2024 Photo by Gomez Daniel
  2. Team Topologies 2 Organizing business and technology teams for fast

    flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press (2019) https://teamtopologies.com
  3. “My own definition of DevOps: Everything you do to overcome

    the friction between silos. All the rest is plain engineering.” – Patrick Debois, 2021 The DevOps Handbook (2nd edition) 3
  4. “My own definition of DevOps: Everything you do to overcome

    the friction between silos. All the rest is plain engineering.” – Patrick Debois, 2021 The DevOps Handbook (2nd edition) 15
  5. 16 Platform as a product is a key pattern to

    “overcome the friction between silos”
  6. “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools,

    services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.” – Evan Bottcher, 2018 https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html 17
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  11. 23 A platform can be a Wiki that improves flow

    and reduces cognitive load for the teams consuming it.
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  13. 37 “Highly evolved firms use a combination of stream-aligned and

    platform teams as the most effective way to manage cognitive load at scale”
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  26. “It's not autonomy doing what you want, it's agency to

    operate with safety - within the encoded values that are jointly shared.” – Byron Miller (RedHat) https://twitter.com/byron_miller/status/1583429784595415040 82
  27. 90 teams & interactions over tools & functionality adoption &

    engagement over mandates & standards rich developer experience over technical prowess open to change and collaborate to discover user needs unblocking internal customers via self-service patterns aiming for superlinear impact with sublinear growth Platform Manifesto