#64: Selling platform engineering to your boss

Hey there! This is Platform Weekly, your weekly turn of the platform engineering book ??

How to sell platform engineering to your boss

Okay, so you know that platform engineering will be a game changer for your team or your organization. But how do you actually sell it to the leadership team? This is the step by step process to develop your plan, and build the Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) that will convince your boss that platform engineering matters.

Step 1: Learn what your boss actually cares about

As much as we might all love platform engineering, management focus and attention and the budget and resources that come with that - are always going to revolve around whatever management's strategic priorities are (or as I like to say, what mgmt cares about).

Step 2: Identify your platform story

The beautiful thing about platform engineering is that it can solve a LOT of different problems. Does your management care about developer productivity and time to market? Well, then you need to be telling a platform story that emphasizes the impact of platform engineering on exactly that.

Step 3: Build a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP)

The bad news? You likely can’t just send your boss one of my articles that support your platform story. They will probably need to see numbers and proof. The good news? You can easily do that yourself in 4 weeks. Build an MVP. Gather some feedback on it. Iterate and then…

Step 4: Prove value

Now that you’ve got an MVP, you can start to prove your platform story. The MVP helps you demonstrate that platform engineering will actually do what you’ve said it will (it will also prove that developers will actually use this new “product”). This makes it far easier to justify the budget and focus allocation from your management team. Esp if you’ve aligned the MVP program with their strategic priorities.

It then becomes a no brainer to expand.