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Hey folks, Does anyone know of any resource (blog...
# general
o
Hey folks, Does anyone know of any resource (blog or talks) that talks about how Platform teams do “Vendor engineering”?
r
What do you mean by Vendor Engineering? 😄
o
I watched a video by Charity from last year’s PlatformCon (see the image below). It’s in quotes on purpose 😅 Essentially, it was described as choosing and evaluating vendors, writing helpers and libraries etc.
l
We’ve not got too much content on that topic in the blog, YT etc
@Jordan Chernev or @Shane Dowling - wondering if you’ve got any knowledge in this area that could be helpful to share for @Oluwalana Olasubomi?
s
The phrase is new to me but it’s certainly an aspect of the role. @Oluwalana Olasubomi does this overlap with procurement process in general? I wonder if there’s research on the procurement side that would be of help. I’ll have a think though and see if I can find something relevant.
o
@Shane Dowling, TBH, I can’t exactly tell. But my instincts tell me there’d be a small overlap. I’m personally exploring the area to see what folks are doing. We should chat more. I can DM you. Maybe I’ll write something about it from chatting with multiple folks.
s
Potentially an unexplored (often painful particularly around renewals….) aspect of the role. Happy to chat.
l
Unless it’s too internal, would be great to chat here in the thread so others can join in, learn, and ask questions
o
Oh, I’’m DMing to find a time to chat on call. @Luca Galante
I’d most definitely write a blog post about my findings. 🙂
j
thanks for the tag. if i am interpreting the question correctly, it’s really about continuously evaluating solutions for specific components that make your internal platform offering. to that extent, there isn’t anything special you need to do per se outside of established norms folks are used to and are already doing. good callouts around guardrails during the procurement cycle in terms of (early) contract termination for reason or not. perhaps the biggest one that might be easy to overlook is adding end user input from your largest / most important platform customer profiles during a 3P vendor component assessment and evaluation
the usual dimensions to consider are: end user community, size of ecosystem, quality of support, support engagement model (escalation matrix), release cycle, size and quality of the R&D team, business lifecycle stage of the vendor (you want to avoid fly-by-night startups with a risky business strategy from a viability stand point), cost profile, technology fit, security considerations, ease of integration with other (pre)existing systems in your environment, feature maturity, roadmap review for the next 6-12 months, reviewing existing customer references that fit your organization in terms of size, complexity of workloads / use cases (account for both breadth & depth), business vertical… in my experience, gartner and thought works already do the majority of this assessment and legwork so their analysis gets you 80% there in terms of getting down to a potential list of 2-3 finalists that you can more in-depth on the above and just assess quality of fit
o
@Jordan Chernev imo, this is worthy of a post/article on it’s own. You highlighted exactly what I was thinking through — what factors goes into vendor assessment for any particular problem domain for the internal platform.
a
Nice find @Oluwalana Olasubomi I think that was the first I had heard of it too by that name. But I think that is an absolute stand in for platform engineering. Platforms take commodities to the world and make them commodities to your organisation. If you are spending time building things you can buy, you will be in a world of ROI hurt around value you are adding. And if you are spending time building things that only one team will use, you will be in a different world of ROI hurt around cost to maintain.
j
sure, i can post something and tie it to charity major’s tweet as well
i’ll make myself a note for it and likely add it to the content i publish on a weekly basis under my LI profile
i haven’t quite gotten around to standing up a blog or whatever so that might be a good enough medium for now
l
It could also go on the platformengineering.org/blog @Jordan Chernev it’s open for anyone in the community who wants to share stuff there (as vendor neutral as possible)
o
Just coming back here to say that I just asked one of our enterprise customers to share their internal RFC on adopting Convoy and I’m seeing a LOT of similarities with what @Jordan Chernev shared. 🙂 😆🙌🏽
j
been there, done that
o
I rate it! 😂
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