The Platform Team Conundrum
Marc-Daniel Ortega
Director of Engineering | CTO | Leader of Leaders | Driving Success Through OKRs, Strategic Planning, & Team Empowerment
The thoughts and writings expressed in this content are my own and do not necessarily represent the views, opinions, or official stance of my employer or any affiliated organization. This content is a reflection of my personal thoughts, experiences, and perspectives.
Back to the definition
From the insightful book of M. Skelton and M. Pais, team topologies, we can extract the definition of a platform teams as :
[a team] that provides a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by Stream-aligned teams
The definition also suggests that a platform team would look like an hybrid of other types of teams, a mix of stream-aligned team and enabling team . The last type mostly helping stream-aligned teams to overcome obstacles sometimes by detecting missing capabilities.
On the overall, introducing such a definition for a platform team invites to move away from the traditional perception of a donkey tasking group of individuals acting as the beck and call for domain (stream-aligned) teams.
That definition implies in essence that the stream-aligned teams accept to lift up their game to a devOps level by accepting accountability and ownership of all technical aspects of the domain they are serving.
A genuine stream-aligned team will deploy and manage their own infrastructure, publish their own data in the Company EDW, develop their own screens in a mobile application while the SRE, Data and Mobile Platform will provide the proper tools to help reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams.
Of course, in this context, members of all teams behave as genuine engineers, thriving as problem solvers with a clear intention to grow for themselves and for their teams. The Company must expect from each software engineer a growth plan both for multi disciplinary technical skills and soft skills.
This approach supports a scalable model in terms of delivery, as platform teams help streamed-align teams reduce their cognitive load so they can focus on the actual business value to deliver .
Moreover, in this model teams which embraced ownership and accountability will be able to deploy fully verticalised/isolated domains, with the benefit of limiting the blast radius of impacts during incidents. Nice outcome that translates into a higher SLA for each domain and a lower MTTR.
The path to a Platform Team setup
For having walked the walk of setting platform team ecosystems, both as a leader of streamed align teams (aka as a stakeholder), and as a leader of platform teams touching different domains, the following strategies prove to bring value :
In a Data Platform team we once even introduced a governance process defining the condition of use of a platform product, equipped with an alerting mechanism triggered when running costs exceeded a specific threshold.
With an infrastructure team, we proved beneficial to derive our quarterly OKR definition as a snapshot of our continuous roadmapping . The roadmapping exercise also facilitated to some extent the difficult exercise of resolving the impedance mismatch between a team level objective definition and a company objective definition .
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The commitment and involvement of each of the member of the platform team play of course a crucial role in the success of the setup. We found convenient in many occasions to call for champions in order to run internal initiatives required to support the reach of our objectives and strategies.
Platform team members act as great ambassadors during stakeholder meetings . The immersion into these regular sessions, sometimes pointing to challenges and missed opportunities, helps entertaining a periodic reality check. And platform teams need reality checks to distill the right amount of pragmatism during prioritisation or continuous roadmapping exercise.
One takeaway from these few years of experience demonstrates that only top performers, aka problem solvers, can compose successful Platform teams. Both hard skills and soft skills contribute to build this level of competence.
The challenges
A lot of road blocks path the way to a successful Platform team setup within a Company. Road blocks both internal and external to the Platform teams themselves.
Internally, a transformation will prove difficult when some platform team members will reject the process of change. We are dealing here with a scenario common to all teams changes. The same scenario unrolls when teams working in silo move to a cross functional configuration.
Team mates rejecting the change usually suffer from the typical hero syndrome developed during the times when the team was the beck and call for all stream-aligned teams. These members often perceive themselves as the gatekeepers of infrastructure, data, mobile applications, etc.
It can happen that not all team members display the level of skills to expect from a genuine engineer . In times when companies just give a title, and individuals generally do not thrive to earn that title, teams can include members rejecting any form of structured process, refusing to think beyond the team boundaries, and simply wanting to pull tasks from a board like donkeys (hard to find a better figure of speech). No need to mention that these team members will slow the momentum as they cannot endorse the accountability for internal initiatives, stakeholder meetings, etc.
Externally, operating changes to a platform setup can raise big challenges . From the perspective of stream-aligned teams, the transition to an actual ownership and accountability for infrastructure, data, mobility, web, etc. comes along with the fear of change. Although conceptually, adopting internal products remains similar to the adoption of yet another framework, stream-aligned teams can perceive that as a tough change, as it brings new responsibility and breaks the boundaries of the comfort zone.
In that case "engineers by title", and not by heart, will also oppose to the changes and will slow down their own stream-aligned team during the development of this new collaboration with platform teams. In such a situation stream-aligned teams can hide behind many reasons like an overwhelming workload, the time required to adopt the platform product, etc. Any excuse will do and in most cases these reasons just fold down to a lack of seniority and expertise, both mixed with a basic fear of change. Experience proves that these stream-aligned teams also usually fail to check the basic acceptance criterias to deliver sound domain features in terms of quality, stability, reliability, performance in all areas enabled by the platform teams.
These stream-aligned teams, blind to their own skill gaps and lack of performance, will build up resentment, often blaming platform teams for bringing more workload.
Sometimes a company can itself slow down the process of a platform team setup transformation. The most common error consist in involving non technical people in a prioritisation or continuous roadmapping process, like product people or designers. That leads to conflict of interests driven by the obsession of non technical individuals to deliver Company customer value at any costs, when platform teams only enable internal stakeholders. Most of the time non technical people think about platform teams as service teams driving them to eventually become bottlenecks again.
So what ?
The failure to change to a platform team setup configuration sends a strong message to any IT company in terms of its capacity to deliver a sound solution to its customers. Specifically in a scale-up phase.
This failure mostly points to internal flaws and gaps in terms of process and skills and should be an opportunity for leaders to ask themselves if the teams they built and support still fit the challenges a scale up or a transformation process requires.
Of course in a modern world of political correctness and fragility, the answers and solutions managers need to bring to solve the equation for a successful platform team transformation probably require to take some strong decisions. This test can also help companies select the strongest and toughest leaders that will help build a stable future through a successful but difficult transformation .
Companies still have to be willing to make this choice.