@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.
j
Jessica Ulyate
06/09/2022, 5:50 PM
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
c
Colin Humphreys
06/09/2022, 5:56 PM
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
Otherwise I'd look for talks by @Paula Kennedy on platform teams.
o
Oliver Lewis
06/09/2022, 6:11 PM
That's a great read, thanks for sharing! And I'll add Paula talk to my "to-watch" list 🙂
j
Jelmer Borst
06/09/2022, 8:18 PM
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
m
Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies)
06/09/2022, 9:34 PM
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.
It's not easy!
I wouldn't focus on roles as much as getting the team to have a baseline understanding and usage of the skillset I mentioned.
With training, facilitating from other teams/people in the org, and possibly onboarding a couple of people. Depends on the overall organization maturity, knowledge, and availability to help.