Hello All! In our company we are the first managing the Platform Engineering and I am the PM of our internal platform. We are organizing a workshop with the scope to gather requirement for the product from the stakeholder. It will be an occasion to collaborate with them and collect their real needs for the product. Can I ask what can be the right questions to let the stakeholder have the focus on Platform and really address the scope of the workshop, in your opionion? What would you ask to let the stakeholder to have space for brainstorming and avoid bias from for example our roadmap? Does anyone already face this challenge to involve the stakeholder and focus their attention on valuable requirement for the product? Thank you in advance for your powerful feedback!

I can’t find it online, but when I worked at VMware/Broadcom we had idea of platform health markers (PHM). The PHM were 10 areas/ideas which made up a healthy platform, such as backup and recovery, SLOs/SLIs, continuity, HA, etc. You could identify the areas of a healthy platform, send an independent survey to the stakeholders asking them to rank the areas, and then your workshop would be you presenting the findings of the survey.

I’ve created a full course dedicated to such workshops, based on my 5-years exp setting up Platforms as manager. https://drogaarchitektait.pl/en/efficient-platform-manager-global/ (mostly module 3) Here is some free ideas though: https://khalasa.com/2024/01/how-to-approach-internal-developer-platform-delivery/ Use few exercises with developers: • value stream mapping on feature delivery, bugfix, onboarding, networking requests • make a DevOps tools map: instances, who runs what etc • Check on maturity assessment questions from Mark Hornbeek, Engineering DevOps

on valuable requirement for the product

general tip is to let them stay focus on the problem-space, not talking about possible solutions. Finding the right solutions will be up to your team.

Good morning! Thank you to all for your very useful feedbacks and suggestions!

@Francesca Digiacomo - do you already have some platforms operational or you will be building new ones? If its going to be new offerings, keeping in mind that platform is typically built to solve for common, recurring, non-functional requirements, you can ask them questions like • what are the typical tasks you do daily on a recurring basis that are not directly for feature development. • what are some tasks that take away from your feature development capacity • what are some tasks you need to do, but do not really understand well and cause heavy cognitive load.

We have already some platform operational, we have designed a roadmap with some category we would like to develop but for MVP we need to align with the stakehokder in order to be sure to meet their real needs, so thank you so much for your example of questions, I think they fit a lot with the purpose of the workshop.

Glad it helped. I think you can formulate questions around the problems like Alessandro mentioned. If you start by sharing the solutions they might get distracted by the "shiny new object" and not tell you about what are the largest issues they are facing

> Can I ask only some examples in your opinion about problem-space? Yes you're example is correct. In my experience developers were just asking for more permissions to deal with infra topics, but that's already a possible solution, not the real problem we need to dig into.

Hi Francesca, will your stakeholder be your first customer? If so, you may want to ask a leading question such as: How are you building your apps/solutions/services today? In your workshop, you can then map out some common journeys such: Setting up a new environment, adding a team member to the project, and deploying a change to production. Look for any problems that your platform can solve. If your stakeholder is not your customer, but is accountable for your Platform in some way, then you could ask questions such as: Who are our early adopters/customers? What problem will we solve for them? How are they solving their problem today? How will we manage governance questions, such as "who pays" and "what approvals are required"?