@Colin Humphreys, @Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies), @Jessica Ulyate: From your experience, what does the optimal platform team look like? In terms of size and roles. And how to balance workload? Thanks for sharing your experience 🙂, Colin, such honesty in talking about fails is truly exceptional.

I believe @Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies) will be able to give a much more balanced answer as he's spoken to many companies in the past. I think this depends on many factors, the size of your org, how mature the tech stack is etc

Hi @Oliver Lewis. Thank you for the kind words. We could speak for hours about platform team composition, balanced teams, signals for change, etc. A good starting place, imho, is this platform as a product whitepaper (it's a little old now), which covers some basics on teams on page 6 https://apexassembly.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/pvwp-pivotal-platform-solutions.pdf

That's a great read, thanks for sharing! And I'll add Paula talk to my "to-watch" list 🙂

There's a nice read from Peter Seibel on this, with quite the mathematical approach 🤓 https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ TL;DR; it depends on the general effectiveness of your engineers and the delta (multiplier) the platform team offers

I don't think there's such thing as an optimal platform team, sorry 🙂 However, I can say there is an important skillset for modern platform teams working in a Platform as a Product approach which is often missing: UX, product development, technical writing, DevRel. (true) Agile approaches are also often missing, as is pair programming or a test-driven approach.