Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms @ AllDayDevOps, Oct 2023

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 of understanding 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 traditionally teams and groups are incentivized for outputs, the more cycles you can run and the faster you can close requests the better. So 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 start to see it in other domains of the business as well: data science & 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.

Transcript

1. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms Manuel Pais co-author of Team Topologies Photo by Gomez Daniel AllDayDevOps 2023 - 26 Oct 2023
2. Team Topologies 2 Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press (2019) https://teamtopologies.com
3. Infographics • Getting Started • In a Nutshell 3 teamtopologies.com
4. academy.teamtopologies.com
5. 9 The ways of working outside Engineering (in)directly impact the flow of value
6. 10 Engineering Legal HR Leadership Accounting Marketing
7. 15 Teams tend to optimize for low-value internal processes over high-value outcomes
9. “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) 17
10. “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 19
11. 20 Platform as a product is a key pattern to “overcome the friction between silos”
12. 21 Treat others as your customers
13. 22 A platform can be a Wiki that improves flow and reduces cognitive load for the teams consuming it.
14. 32 Engineering Platforms What we got right (so far)
15. 33 Platforms focused on the user experience (DevEx)
17. 35 Platforms as key to manage cognitive load at scale
18. 36 “Highly evolved firms use a combination of stream-aligned and platform teams as the most effective way to manage cognitive load at scale”
19. 39 Platform teams with extensive product experience
20. 40 Platform teams with extensive relevant product experience
21. 41 Platform teams with extensive relevant some product experience
22. 42 Engineering Platforms What we’re still missing
23. 43 Platform boundaries need to be fluid
24. 44 Rigid platform boundaries block teams and increase cognitive load
25. 47 Need to be mindful of cognitive load on platform teams
26. 48 Be realistic about capacity & organize around streams of value inside the platform(s)
27. 49 Trust boundaries strongly impact platform effectiveness
28. 50 Platform org design & comms need to be optimized for high trust
29. 53 Treat others as your customers
30. 54 Compliance as a Platform
33. 57 Legal as a Platform
36. 60 Lack of adequate team interactions prevents effective platform evolution
40. 65 Leadership as a Platform
43. 79 Playing well together (with shared values)
44. 82 1) Prioritize fast flow of value to (end) customers
45. 83 2) Unblock others through (curated) self-service patterns
46. 85 3) Platform is open to change, collaborate to discover new needs
47. 4) Optimize for adoption and discoverability 86
48. 5) Enable others by meeting them where they are today 87
49. 89 Engineering Legal HR Leadership Accounting Marketing
50. 93 Copyright © Team Topologies Ltd 2023. All rights reserved. teamtopologies.com