Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

Hi <@U05BV20SMPC>! I’m on <@U02V2EHPUHY>’s team, so I’ll answer to the best of my knowledge until he gives his own :smile:

I think what is most important is to have a true relationship with your “customers”. In our case, we personally know all of our internal early adopters (we have ~10 of them, so it’s relatively easy to keep track). As in any product, we are learning with every new version, so it’s not rare that we have bugs.

What is most important is to keep the communication open at all times. Psychological safety plays a huge part of this. We trust that when our customers ask us for a specific functionality, they will tell us if it’s a simple nice to have or something more important as accurately as they can. And from their point of view, they trust us that whenever we have issues or delays, we are doing everything we can to update them along the way and keep the process transparent.

So I would say at our current stage delivering value and delivering reliability is the same thing as the old “using DevOps to go fast with security built-in”. We work on both fronts slowly but surely. This is done by being transparent about the limits of our current implementation, what our customers should expect and when, etc. :slightly_smiling_face:

Hope that makes sense! Thanks for the question!

Hi <@U05BV20SMPC>! Sorry for the late response, we had a DevOps team building activity yesterday pm (my first time go-karting! :racing_car: :sweat_smile:).

Thanks for your question.  I don't think that delivering value fast through small incremental steps has to compete with delivering quality and reliability.  On the contrary, I believe that holding on to changes and delivering them in larger increments would make it much harder for our small team to cover all the surface and ensure it's bug free and stable.  Especially as we don't have the time to create very thorough end-to-end and integration test suites, only some lower level unit tests for the trickiest parts.  Our QA has to be done in the field, in collaboration with devs.  Having very small increments allows us to work with them to ensure everything works as expected in their real world scenarios.

Also, with our early adopters, we benefit from them having more patience and will to make do with a few kinks and imperfections, that would be more damageable to our larger audience.  But, in order to preserve that patience and good will from our early adopters, we treat them as VIPs, prioritizing fixing any issues they may encounter, spending time with them live to address those issues.  That way, they feel important, supported and know that the risks they are taking by being early adopters is well balanced by our high level of engagement with them.