people who are part of large engineering orgs - how big is the platform team relative to the entire org?

Subscribing to the thread to see any responses you get. How large is a large engineering org?

Let’s say 100 or more for the sake of including a lot of people. The one I’m dealing with is about an order of magnitude larger though.

We're around 400 in tech and 3000 across the business. Our platform team is around 20 engineers. I think a good measure for central teams like platform should be about 15-20% of the engineering org (We're obviously some way below that 😅) Google had a reference of 20% for central teams, I'll have to find the reference. I'll post here if I come across it

Does the platform team include domain teams or the platform engineering? For the first one, we have like 300 domain engineers, but a new team called integration team of 5. I am trying to reshape it into become the planform engineering. Baby steps!

The 400 includes platform engineering. So 380 are domain engineers and 20 are platform engineers. Within Platform Engineering we have the following product teams • SRE • Cloud Engineering • DevX • Edge - Everything on edge of our Cloud network

Interested by this thread as well 👀

👀

It would be interesting to know how you separate tech leadership roles from Product roles @Abz Mungul. We have Head of engineering, CTO and I belong as a Platform PM to the Product team under CPO.

We had a similar split. There are pros and cons to this approach. Reporting into the Product org, keeps you within that structure and helps with relationship building, staying up to date with the strategy within the product org. It also helps with your own personal growth since as a product person you have product people to support and develop you. Where it can fall apart is that your manager or CPO may not have visibility in what your doing and the challenges you are facing and overcoming, recognition could also become an issue. It's important that you manage up and create the necessary forums (with your HoE supporting) to communicate to senior stakeholders, your platform as a product strategy, and product horizons. Reporting directly in to the HoE may keep you focused on the challenges within platform engineering, but may isolate you from the product function and impact your growth. You could take a matrix management approach that way you can benefit from alignment with the HoE Hope that helps

Thanks, that was very enlightening and confirms my concerns. I would probably go with some type of Platform engineering forum to align Engineering and Product in a good way. I do believe that the product perspective will help Engineering get a better priority on important improvements in the platform.

Yes definitely. Adoption rate of platform capabilities and customer empathy are the two biggest challenges. Winning "hearts and minds" is key piece, so a platform engineering could definitely help with that