Innovating with Precision: How Platform Engineering Drives Capabilities for Enterprises

Platform engineering should help you innovate well into your future instead of having it force itself upon you. A recent survey found that 51% of organizations have adopted platform engineering within the last three years, and 93% said it's a step in the right direction.

You should never feel like you're handcuffed by your technology - unless you're actually handcuffed, of course.

What is platform engineering?

As per Gartner " Platform engineering is an emerging technology approach that can accelerate the delivery of applications and the pace at which they produce business value."

Does this mean DevOps is dead?

No, DevOps is still alive and well. Platform engineering is an additional approach that can help speed up the delivery of applications. It is complementary to the existing DevOps methodology and can be used in conjunction with it to help organizations achieve their desired outcomes faster.

DevOps problems can be solved by different teams in different ways, which is not efficient. However, if they join forces, they can come up with a solution together. In order to scale it in your organization, Platform Engineering is required.

"Agile Empowerment: Cloud Native Triumph"

Empowering developers and platform teams is crucial for companies to thrive in the cloud native era. Delivering higher-quality software at a rapid pace enables faster time to market, increased customer satisfaction, and a competitive advantage. Developer productivity is key, and platforms should provide self-service capabilities without burdening developers with tool complexity. Platform teams, while responsible for the platform, must also address issues impacting creativity, foster collaboration, enhance platform value, promote efficient use of services, and improve product reliability. Additional resources, guidance, and expertise are often necessary to achieve these goals.

The key to platform engineering is to treat your platform as a product!

With delivering a product,?platform engineering should always fulfill its purpose: bundle the desired value for the consumer and the developer, in the form of capabilities.

A capabilities strategy for successful product development

A competency is essentially an organizational skill or area of expertise. Competencies can be either "hard," such as predictive analytics and software development, or "soft," such as decision making and talent management. When individual competencies are combined in a meaningful way, the result is a capability which supports the organization's ability to create significant value for customers. Capabilities can serve as a basis for sustainable marketplace differentiation and advantage since they cannot be replicated easily by competitors.

Why do capabilities matter in corporate strategy?

There is an amazing article "Competing on Capabilities:?The New Rules of Corporate Strategy" published ages ago (1992) in Harvard Business Review magazine that states four basic principles of capabilities based competition:

1. The building blocks of corporate strategy are not products and markets but business processes.

2. Competitive success depends on transforming a company’s key processes into strategic capabilities that consistently provide superior value to the customer.

3. Companies create these capabilities by making strategic investments in a support infrastructure that links together and transcends traditional SBUs and functions.

4. Because capabilities necessarily cross functions, the champion of a capabilities-based strategy is the CEO.

Purpose of this background is to emphasize why capabilities matter not just in the corporate strategy but also in perspective of platform engineering, although they differ in regards to competencies. But the essence remains the same if platform is treated as a product.

What are platform capabilities?

The capabilities of a platform include everything necessary to achieve the overarching platform goal. Platform engineering describes the activity of acquiring and continuously improving these capabilities as a platform team.

The key to platform engineering is to treat your platform as a product! With delivering a product,?platform engineering should always fulfill its purpose: bundle the desired value for the consumer and the developer, in the form of capabilities.

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To ensure long-term success, platform teams need clear product ownership, a dedicated team, a product owner, a clear vision, a transparent roadmap, and sourcing strategies.

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A platform team should align high-level platform capabilities with strategic objectives and consider performance, bottlenecks, and needed building blocks to determine a platform's crucial capabilities.

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During the build phase, platform teams should focus on configurability, security, feature completeness, and production readiness, demonstrating continuous evolution through an MVP and process-related features.

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In order to be able to support smooth application management, platforms must ensure that they create unhindered and independent experimentation and release capabilities for developers.

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Assure long-term security and stability of operations, troubleshooting within a short timeframe, preventative maintenance, lifecycle management, and root cause remediation by the platform teams.

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Platform teams should advise developers and offer cloud native training, onboard applications and use cases, and market their platforms to all stakeholders.

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As platform teams continue to expand platform capabilities and manage the platform at scale, they must enable specific use cases, hyperscalers of different maturity levels, and teams of various maturity levels with the goal of optimizing cost, provisioning, and benefits.

In conclusion, platform engineering is a transformative approach that empowers organizations to innovate and secure their future. By treating the platform as a product and focusing on delivering value through capabilities, companies can drive faster application delivery, enhance collaboration, and gain a competitive advantage. Embracing platform engineering enables high-quality software, faster time to market, and increased customer satisfaction in the dynamic digital landscape. It's the key to unlocking innovation and shaping a successful future.