I am guessing a lot of people/leaders here are on a team that is specifically around platform. Do you publicize a team vision? I am putting together a "Platform Handbook" and considering putting something like that at the top of the landing page. We have a lot of "What does this team even do?" at my org and I have been pushing to change that. Does your org or engineering groups use a "vision" to call to?

Hey Ian, in our case our platform documentation’s landing page consists of what’s the core use of the platform followed with main set of features of the platform. It covers the main vision and where we are heading as well.

Thanks for you reply. Yea that is what I was thinking. What do you focus your vision on? My first draft is the following: > Provide an environment to write software that is fun to write, easy to modify, seamlessly deploys, and delivers value to our stakeholders. We have broader missions statements that focus on the business, but this one is my just my team. I also started off with "fun to write" specifically because my personal mission leading this team is to clear all the cruft that stops us from doing what we like, writing code.

Our main focus is to improve developer productivity by reducing the cognitive load and the constant worry of managing/ configuring evolving cloud native tools for developers. All our features and introductions revolve around that vision. I see your is the same. I think there is no right or wrong answer in this. If your team grasps the whole idea of the vision then that’s what works for you 🙂 And it never has to be fixed it always evolves

Great points, thanks for your input

Really like that @Ian Cullinane. Vision is super important imo. Platform engineering by it’s very nature could touch and encompass way way too many teams and too much responsibility - so it’s important to really hone in on a specific vision. That makes it way easier to tie in your actual goals, measurement, and messaging

Yep that helps a lot to publicise. Also suggest to do that vision/mission session with your team to make sure on same page. Our Head Of did this session with us but it was super pathetic where instead of focusing on whats needed/input from the team, he started explaining his own personal journey (including showing his driving license photo lol) and completely avoiding the team past,current details into consideration.

we have a team notion doc with a few lines at the top that says what we do, and then a longer list of "things we own" and "projects in progress". I'd love to read other platform team's homepage though

Awesome that is all really cool. @Tech Account that sounds.....annoying. So typical though, could be worse I guess haha business

Love that @Mehul Kar

+1 to sharing the vision. i do note that a vision / north star is different from a mission statement / charter which is what some of the responses in this thread have surfaced

@Jordan Chernev do you have a northstar for your team that you can share? (we're trying to come up with one for us also at the moment and... floundering, tbh)

ask chatgpt to generate something using this diagram as input -

IME clearer communication about objectives is critical with larger teams. Often needs repeating and adjustment as things change but helps immensely with prioritization and motivation. "Why are we doing this?" should be resolved before it hits critical mass, which will slow things down and create a very demotivated environment. Balance of course is if you treat everything as the objective it gets very muddy, so keep it concise.

In my old company I had a real nice confluence space that had similar mission/guidelines, and I created it into a template for other teams to copy. This is where we shared our mission and tagline, as well as contact info and links to main features documentation etc. Here's how that looked (including bonus confluence space structure)

Nice, I wanted the engineering handbook to be logically separate from our Confluence page, and ended up using Quartz combined with Obsidian.md to publish our own page. It worked really well because we already had a github repo that was a collection of markdown docs just for the engineers. When we need to we link back to Confluence but our engineers much prefer markdown in Github which is satisfied by the Quartz repo

@Jordan Chernev, thanks for the excellent diagram. In case anyone else found it useful, it is part of this article, which is worth a read.

the actual source of the article cote writes against is here - https://files.ontraport.com/media/77fec4104c904234ba41aaf179c9906b.phplxipy7?Expires=1[…]9leGMQeXDRFFSt3JcOiWv3OA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJVAAMVW6XQYWSTNA