How Platform Engineering Works

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👋 Hi, I’m Chad McElligott ● Auction house for luxury merchandise ● ~2000 employees ● ~$8 Billion in Sales in 2022 ● ~70 engineers ● 4 of us in Platform Engineering Staff Infrastructure Engineer @ Sotheby’s

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How Platform Engineering Works Lessons from my first year as a Platform Engineer

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What does “Platform Engineering” mean to you? Velocity and Stability. … OK! 😅

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Platform Engineering is the application of a Product Mindset to supporting your engineering organization’s software delivery velocity and system stability.

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Velocity and Stability are the “What” and “Why” of Platform Engineering

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the speed we move from idea to delivery Velocity Sub-Disciplines ● Build Engineering ● “DevOps” ● Developer Experience ● Developer Productivity Key Metrics ● Lead Time for Changes ● Deployment Frequency

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a consistent experience Stability the speed we move from idea to delivery Velocity Sub-Disciplines ● Infrastructure Engineering ● “DevSecOps” ● Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? Key Metrics ● Change Failure Rate ● Mean Time to Recover Sub-Disciplines ● Build Engineering ● “DevOps” ● Developer Experience ● Developer Productivity Key Metrics ● Lead Time for Changes ● Deployment Frequency

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Adopting a Product Mindset is the “How” of Platform Engineering

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Set goals on outcomes, not outputs Lesson 1 of 4

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Set goals on outcomes, not outputs how we plan our work Our OKR Process

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Set goals on outcomes, not outputs how we plan our work Quarterly Planning

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Set goals on outcomes, not outputs how we plan our work Story Kickoffs

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Truly know your customer Lesson 2 of 4

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Truly know your customer how we connect with our engineers Slack Support Channel

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Truly know your customer how we connect with our engineers Consulting Collaboration

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Truly know your customer how we connect with our engineers Engineering Survey

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Don’t just respond… Invent Lesson 3 of 4

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Don’t just respond… Invent feedback is not enough Introducing Known-Good Practices

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Don’t just respond… Invent feedback is not enough Iterating on Existing Solutions

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Don’t just respond… Invent feedback is not enough https://youtu.be/eJG7uIU9NpM Experimenting with New Technology

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Scale your impact Lesson 4 of 4

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Scale your impact don’t be yet another “ops” team Making good build vs. buy choices

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Scale your impact don’t be yet another “ops” team Avoiding interrupt overload

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Summary Four Product Mindset tenets for Platform Engineering: 1. Set goals on outcomes, not outputs 2. Truly know your customer(s) and their needs 3. Invent on behalf of your customer, don’t just working reactively 4. Scale your impact by investing time/$$$ wisely and managing toil A Product Mindset × (Velocity + Stability) = How ✨Platform Engineering✨ Works

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Thank you! 🙏 chadxz.dev hachyderm.io/@chadxz linkedin.com/in/chadmcelligott