Going to ask a (what could be seen as “stupid” question), but I’m very curious for the input 🙂 Why is the Team Topologies book almost at the heart of the conversations about platform? (I have my thoughts and suspicions, but would love to hear your thoughts, first 🙂)

Because a platform team needs to exist in a environment where it will thrive, and Team Topologies is a good example of such.

What Nathan said, when your building a platform you will encounter a lot of the team types mentioned in the book, its good to have a understanding of them and how you could cater the platform to those types of teams, as well on how to interact with the different team types.

IMO it also is because of the clarification of interaction modes. If teams don’t understand collaboration and facilitating and x-as-a-service they struggle to create the right experiences. For example. trying to scale collaboration and then being frustrated when that doesn’t work so well

It’s all about value proposition

^ aka Conway’s Law at work

Because it basically describes the most important aspects of what a platform grouping really is and how that platform really relates to other teams and to the organization in general. There are some assumptions that platforms are mandatory services for every team to use. They actually should be treated as an internal product with product owners trying to market it to teams so that they themselves want to use it. This gives the idea a better frame and more significance.