Creative Platform Teams

Last week I saw this great visualisation by Ant Murphy.?

This is something that many platform teams and organisations I've? worked with often struggle with. Even when the rest of the organisation is good at experimentation and working towards goals, the platform teams often connect to initiatives and company objectives through other teams asking for features or abilities. When OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are used they are often reverse engineered from requests.

I’ve seen platform organisations move themselves out of this situation. They tend to use a combination of these things:

• Leadership creates space for forward looking strategy creation (eg. Deep thinking sessions)
• The organisation identifies clearly who their internal customers are (product insights, product and tech in close collaboration) and then make sure to interact often with them looking for what’s on the horizon
• The technical approach focuses on finding scaled platform approaches for the many requests for features.

With this approach, the platform teams get closer to their customers, find ways to contribute to the company broader than from individual specific request from the internal teams and find their own long term objectives parallel to the company initiatives and objectives. And “suddenly” your platform team has the playground to be exploratory and work towards meaningful objectives.

These all require that you create space for forward proactive thinking. You'll find one way of approaching that challenge in this post about Reactive Firefighting.?