Platform teams address a historical problem with infrastructure provisioning and configuration. What Does A Platform Team Do? Explaining the Challenges They Face Because stream-aligned teams work on the full spectrum of delivery, they are, by necessity, closer to the customer and usually already agile. Platform teams are product teams To meet that challenge, a platform team should be run like a product team. A product roadmap communicates the direction of the product and how the team will work together to achieve the business goals. Platform teams need to not only understand their own architecture and flow but also a wide range of product flows and business goals. Teams can build the DevOps toolchain they want, thanks tointegrations with leading vendors and marketplace apps. On a high level, the platform and product teams might seem similar to the business and infrastructure squads. The infrastructure squad is not seen as yet another product/business squad with clients and specs that need to be fulfilled. We serve our developers with a secure self-service product where they have maximal freedom to configure the services they provide. You go to the doctor when youre sick, but not to teach you some history class! Are we lacking capabilities in some areas that are not being addressed by any team? In conclusion, the gains of either can outweigh the difficulties and challenges, but it is usually the case that companies dont think through it! The number of meetings will double. Research has shown that companies that invest in design early on enjoy greater success. The platform teams success is inextricably linked to the success of these functional teams, and without them, the funding and support wont be there when you need it. Discover a reborn Mortal Kombat Universe created by the Fire God Liu Kang. The naive thinking that freedom of choice will make engineers more effective at solving problems will hunt you down! Where product teams may work on building prototypes and quickly turning a spec into a functional demo, a platform team tends to have longer projects with a focus on operations. Product teams can see the platform team as a bottleneck and avoid involving them because that brings in extra coordination effort. Automating your development cycle ensures that moving things along is a seamless process, regardless if the next step is an action like an automated test or merge to main, or an actual human. If an enabling team does its job well, the team it assists should no longer need help after a few weeks or so. These capabilities are cloud-agnostic. Everything you need, all in one place. Our product makes it possible for our feature teams to deliver features faster to OUR customers. It can be a single product or service, a single set of features, a single user journey, or a single user persona. And as a result, new tools are seen as a blocker and not a relief, creating more frustration, wasted engineering efforts, and increases the tech debt. What benefits does this give, and why would an organisation adopt this approach? Photo by Mikhail Fesenko from Pexels . And as a result of high independency and almost no coordination with other teams because who wants to get bogged down by other teams, this creates silos among backend engineers and client engineers across all squads, silos between business and infrastructure squads. A Product Manager sits at the intersection between business, design, and tech. They look ahead into the future to see how their stuff is going to be used, how it may evolve, and how a future transition can be managed. You can ensure that your products deliver the most value to customers by usingfeature flags to automate roll-outs to a subset of users, alpha and beta releases to solicit and measure user feedback and behavior, and qualitative continuous feedback via comments, support tickets,and community forums. When they move to a people-management position, they work with product management teams and oversee more things at more of a macro level. Topology of a Data Product Team Without good design, a product will receive either little to no attention, or a slew of negative reviews. If you're running a startup, Teams platform helps to increase awareness of your products. During his career, he has successfully managed enterprise software development tools in all phases of their lifecycle, from cradle to grave. Most team members must be specialists in a particular area of knowledge to understand and make changes to the subsystem. Build your own app's copilot with the new Teams AI library The following questions should be asked to determine if you have a stream-aligned team: Does your team aim to produce a steady flow of features? Product teams, if a platform team is created, may experience a productivity increase due to shared architecture, components and resources. Different Types of Product Teams (Core, Platform, Growth, First) This diplomacy can be an even bigger challenge than a platform teams technical responsibilities. So, who is the platform teams customer? The Forrester study found a 291% ROI and net benefit . They run a lot of experiments to test certain features and understand user behavior. Where squad teams favored autonomy, independence, and little coordination, platform & product teams coordinate planning early on. LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Like a product team, a successful platform team must understand the needs of its "customers" and stakeholders. When not speaking or coding, you are likely to find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming, and domain-specific languages. Stream-aligned teams focus on a single, impactful stream of work. This team has to figure out everything from the ground up. That means a Platform Product Manager will need to have a good grasp on the business strategy of their company, as well as a handle on the direction it is going in. Created by Product School and Gainsight in this book we explore how to get inside your customers mind. Do teams have the necessary balance between autonomy and support from other teams. Download now: 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap With that in mind, I have a suggestion for how to help ensure platform team success: run them like a product team. In cloud-based environments, infrastructure is being automated and spun up in a matter of minutes. The request and the fulfilment of it are automated. info@teamtopologies.com | +44 (0)20 8242 4170, book | training | resources | events | about | news | brand guidelines | search, [ data privacy policy | payment and contract options | use of Team Topologies materials | website status ], Copyright (c) 2021-2023 Team Topologies Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Project Management The Complete Guide to Platform Product Management: Everything You Need to Know Michael Sanders on March 8, 2022 As a business, you know that in order to be successful, you need to have a product that is managed effectively. Infrastructure operators have to think like software engineers if they wish to rise to the challenge. By continuing, you agree to our, 4 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Cloud Native App Platform, How GitHub Uses GitHub to Be Productive and Secure, Cloud Native Skill Gaps are Killing Your Gains, Chainguard Improves Security for Its Container Image Registry, How to Protect Containerized Workloads at Runtime, How to Containerize a Python Application with Paketo Buildpacks. The vision should be formulated differently. Gartner's Bill Blosen, senior director analyst, and Paul Delory, research vice president, describe it as "the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms (IDPs) for software delivery and life cycle management." Their work support and enable business squads to develop services seemingly easily. It has a name. They need requirements, scoping, and prioritization. All these things centralized under one umbrella comprise the platform in platform team. A platform product team will have to work on building something that can scale with the size of the company, as the company is investing in technology that will not be directly bringing in revenue. Many of these areas are blind spots for development teams but are critical to the safety element of shipping software. Client engineers take this technical doc as an input, but theyre more interested in the APIs (request & response payloads); that is their contract with the backend folks. This often results in quite some communication and one of the biggest wastes: waiting time. Platform teams need to be ahead of demands coming from the product teams, because otherwise if the platform cant react to their needs quickly enough, product teams may end up hacking it together so theyre unblocked. Can eBPF Agent in Kubernetes Be the Key to Better Observability? The Team Topologies tt logo (in color, greyscale, and both with and without the words Team Topologies) is a Registered Trademark in multiple jurisdictions. Platform teams need to establish feedback loops with their users before they start building the platform. A common pitfall is to embed specialists in every stream-aligned team who uses the subsystem. The platform teams main goal is to help developers safely ship software as quickly as possible while meeting the needs of organizational stakeholders. Not only does platform engineering encompass what you would traditionally think of as infrastructure virtual machines, compute clusters and networking it also includes all the glue that binds the worlds of applications and infrastructure. With the new approach, platform engineers need to understand not only the infrastructure but also the business needs. So, things like Kubernetes clusters, terraform configurations, development of CI/CD tools, setting up system health and SLOs dashboards, alerts on pager duty, and the list goes on. They have to strike a balance between being enablers and protectors, protecting product teams from doing harm to themselves and others. Platform teams create capabilities that can be used by numerous stream-aligned teams, with little overhead.
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