Hey everyone! I’m a product manager who is pretty new to this platform engineering thing. I’ve been working closely with engineering teams for a while, but I’m looking to deepen my understanding of platform engineering, particularly how I can make the transition into platform product management. I’d love to learn from your experiences and insights! 😊 My questions! 1. What is the main differrence between a product manager and a platform product manager? 2. What resources should I be looking at? 3. What are some of the key components you consider essential for a successful platform engineering setup? 4. Are there any specific metrics or KPIs you track to measure the success of platform initiatives in your organization? Looking forward to learning from you all and contributing where I can!

Welcome:) @Krzysztof H., and @Martin Bakal might be good people to help answer these for you.

you can also start here - https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/white-papers/vmware-tanzu-labs-product-manager-playbook

In the meantime, there are some great sources on the platform engineering blog and from platformcon 1. Platform as a Product (Talk) 2. What is Platform Engineering? 3. ? 4.

Thank you @Jordan Chernev and @Luca Galante!!

some more links: • https://teamtopologies.com/platform-manifesto • https://thenewstack.io/5-lessons-for-building-a-platform-as-a-product • https://uxmastery.com/how-to-create-a-customer-journey-map/ • https://files.ontraport.com/media/77fec4104c904234ba41aaf179c9906b.phplxipy7?Expires=1[…]9leGMQeXDRFFSt3JcOiWv3OA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJVAAMVW6XQYWSTNA • https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platform-eng-maturity-model

#4:

Thanks @Jordan Chernev! These are great ahah what a deluge. I’ve diving into the Tanzu one now - had it on my list but actually not read it before. It is a bit more focused on product management as a whole, and less on platform product management @Tess Ericcson So i would make sure to also start with the basics of platform engineering, platform as a product etc

#2: I recommend Team Topologies & Platform Strategy for a start 🙂 you can also check on my resources (this blog & youtube are mine, I have 5years exp as Platform Manager)

@Luca Galante - agreed on tanzu’s doc. still a good document that describes the fundamentals which is why i include it

#1: none 🙂 as long as you realise that Platform, just like any other Product, has business stakeholders and users (business app teams, who does delivery & ops) - and has to reduce the headache of making business process valable (yout business process is SDLC)

Even more great links haha thanks @Krzysztof H. - maybe we should pin this thread in this channel and add all this to the canvas.

I will be organising a free webinar for managers about Platform Engineering in November 🙂 I'll let you know @Jordan Chernev & @Tess Ericcson

Could it work as a community webinar @Krzysztof H.? Been ages since you did one!

it can, why not 🙂

Nice! We’re just actually just starting to open up slots for November. DM’d you! Let’s jump on a quick cal when you’ve got time. If you’ve got a webinar cooking too @Jordan Chernev - would love to get one from you too in November! Your last one was great.

nothing on the books. my family and i just welcomed a new baby so i might be in passive / listening mode for a bit

Congratulations!

Woohoo! Congrats @Jordan Chernev 🎉

this is great!! Thx so much

a valid concern. each archetype has its pros and cons, IMO. in the end, both can be successful as each has to close the gap on a net new role that doesn’t have as many people doing it or pursuing it right now

I have similar opinion do Jordan :)

Love this thread! I can never not share this. H/T John Cutler on LinkedIn. 🌃

is this the slack thread that was linked out to in the latest newsletter btw?

Yes!

Loving this thread! I have been Platform PM for two years now, and still struggling with setting up metrics for my platforms. @Krzysztof H. looking forward to your November webinar. let me know if I can help 🙂

@Tess Ericcson I am a platform PM. I set up metrics last year. I believe it depends on what is important to the team/business to measure. You then create metrics and how to measure those. I am happy to help if you have any questions or want help to get started.

I would love some guidance @Uzma Syed ! Will DM you to set up some time. Thank you so much

Hey @Uzma Syed, @Kashmira Patel - would be great to discuss it here in the thread or in main channel so others can learn too!

@Krzysztof H. can you please add me as well For the webinar?

@Uzma Syed sure! I’ll start a separate thread for it. Thanks again!

@Kashmira Patel @Sam Barlien I will give it a go at a very high level here. Basically, I would start with asking the relevant stakeholders about what metrics are important to them and start measuring those. If you can’t get that info straight up from them, then I would identify the relevant stakeholders on the platform including customers, the use cases the platform caters to for those particular stakeholders, what is important for them, what their pain points are and then design metrics around those. An example on Cloud Platforms for instance is as follows: Relevant teams/stakeholders including customers: • Security Team • Platform Development Team • Platform Operations/Service Delivery Team • Steam Aligned Application Teams An example Use case & associated metric for each of the above teams/stakeholders: Security Team - The cloud Platform team should take measures to increase security compliance across the organiation and reduce overall security risk in Customer Cloud Accounts & so an easy metric to measure here is something that can indicate security posture such as score given by AWS Security Hub and take measures so that customers can maintain a good security posture. Operations/Service Delivery - The cloud platform team should minimise the number of incidents or outages within Cloud. So something that could be measured here is incident frequency and take measure to reduce those Application teams - For teams using our platform, I want to ensure that in the event an incident is raised, we turn that around in a reasonable amount of time so a metric that could be measured here is Mean Time to Resolution Development Team - We want to ensure teams have minimal tech debt so that they can deploy features seamlessly so an example metric for the Development team can include DORA Metrics which includes Deployment Frequency, Lead time to changes etc. Hope the above helps.

Thanks @Uzma Syed , yes definitely helpful. We are doing some of these things but informally. I could make it more official. Thanks for the guidance!

Would be great to get an invite to the webinar in November @Krzysztof H. 🙏

@Uzma Syed thank you for this breakdown! In this approach, did you use some measuring framework like we have in developer experience and software delivery performance? DORA is one approach in that context, but combining DORA metrics with something like SPACE or DevEx frameworks provides a lot more reliable information. Is there something equivalent on the operations, security and software delivery side?

@Wil Koetsier No we did not. I like to be led by problems. So if there was not a problem impacting business goals, we chose not to measure it. We did create custom metrics though such as number of cloud accounts provisioned and number of cloud accounts decommisioned.

@Uzma Syed - did you use any 3rd party tool to measure DORA?

@Kashmira Patel since all our data lives in Service Now, we used that. I am sure JIRA can definitely do it too.

Thanks I will explore what JIRA has.

Folks - here is a link to register for the webinar I've mentioned 🙂 Link to register: https://drogaarchitektait.pl/en/webinar-pe-for-managers/