Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms @ F...

Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms @ FastFlow Conf, Sep 2024

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.

Manuel Pais

September 10, 2024
Tweet

Video

More Decks by Manuel Pais

Other Decks in Business

Transcript

  1. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms Manuel Pais

    co-author of Team Topologies Fast Flow Conf 2024 - 10 Sep 2024 Photo by Gomez Daniel
  2. Team Topologies Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow

    Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press, 2019 teamtopologies.com/book Over 150.000 copies sold
  3. “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
  4. A platform can be a Wiki that improves flow and

    reduces cognitive load for the teams consuming it.
  5. teams & interactions over tools & functionality adoption & engagement

    over mandates & standards rich customer 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