Hi Everyone, There are many of you who may be at the beginning of your platform engineering journey, have matured or are in the midst of it. As I just started mine, I would like to create a solid charter for this new team that will evolve into platform engineering. I was wondering how you started yours, what pillars you defined, what charter was drafted, etc. Can you please share your inputs and experiences? Thanks

It really depends on scope, this was for a 300 person org, we believe are a force multiplier we maximize product velocity sustainably by being trustworthy efficient and inclusive https://sfelc.com/podcasts/operationalizing-values-and-principles-with-andrew-fong, other ones purely for dev infra was akin to “our job is to remove friction between brain and system.”

Thank you, @Andrew Fong Please send me your draft! I'm looking forward to reading it!

I’d definitely push for treating your platforms as products and developing them with that mindset. Starting out with looking at it as an operations/support model will not work in the long run

We recently put together the first iteration of these constructs for our Platform Engineering org at SiriusXM. I ended up defining a mission statement, org principles, and platform tenets. The principles are about how we work/collaborate and what we value, while the tenets are more technically focused on how we make decisions about the platform itself. Happy to share them all.

I’ve seen some bits of what you’re talking about @Jared Wolinsky and would love to see the final, full version

ok let’s see how seamlessly confluence content can paste into a slack post

In my experience the most important part is how you operationalize.

I think a key element is to threat the platform as a "central" service at the organization. The team should have mix of skills and experience and mindsets. Dev types, Ops type, SRE types, even a business/finance/product type, with possible occasional embeds in/from other teams. In other words platform engineering touches all aspects of the company, and also valuing quality of speed in my opinion, because it needs to be a trusted team.

Thank you all for great inputs. I concur with starting the slate clean with product mindset and not operation mindset. But unfortunately 3 out of 5 teams that I have are heavy into operations, lights on etc. I have few ideas to get out of this like automation framework for upgrades and patching. Infrastructure as code for migration etc But can you all share your personal experiences on steering the operation to product development mindset. How did you go about the same? Thanks in advance

It’s really just about leadership and not the technical - the value system and adherence of it. You need to be willing to give object lessons, call things out politely (“all i have is time” - andy grove style), give agency to the team to call you out when you violate the value system, and just be brutal about what you want to optimize for. Read what you do is who you are - horowitz, https://hbr.org/2003/04/tipping-point-leadership, refresh yourself on tuckmans model, be ok with directive leadership For people that aren’t aligned (or you don’t feel they are) ask them to leave, for those that want to change give them a window to change but don’t draw it out too often the change takes too long and you were better ripping the bandaid off

The hardest part I have experienced is converting traditional operational processes (where a systems engineer logs into a machine and makes changes, where the knowledge is basically limited to that one person or team) to infrastructure as code mindset. The key is to show the value in the change in mindset (and there’s a lot of goodness to it!) and maybe start out with one team that’s willing to be the changemaker. Also very important is to tie platform initiatives to company initiatives. Establish that “golden thread”. I learned a lot from this video when I first started out on my journey (which is still ongoing, I’ve reached nowhere 😂)

@Swarna Mani I was an early leader in a Platform team which started the same way - bringing together some ops teams who looked after developer tools. We experimented with a few things that helped us evolve, but a key moment was structuring the team into squads, each with a product owner. Some of the Product Owners were SMEs in the tools they led, but the most success came from bringing in experienced Product Owners who had to learn about their internal customers and how their product helped them. Having a product owner helped teams balance ops + customer feature priorities, and provided a focus on product mindset across the ~300 people in our platform team.

@Swarna Mani is there another organization whose charter does revolve around actual operations? Part of my strategy here is that we have another leader whose remit is operations, including staffing tier 1 and tier 2 ops teams, and we’re working to move much of the ops type work we’ve historically had into that org.

@Jared Wolinsky we’re doing this too! In the early phases of handoff

@Jared Wolinsky / @Kashmira Patel My understanding of the transformation is similar to this, and I would love to hear about it. This is something I wanted to explore because I think it could expedite the transformation. How did you make this argument to the executive leadership? I would love to hear your experiences.

we’re still in the process of getting this sorted. we started with categorizing the work into different buckets such as KTLO, Ops, core platform. For each activity, we ask the following questions: • Does this work belong with the Platform team at all? • If you were starting Platform from scratch, would you include this work in your design? • If you move the work (and capacity) will it create efficiency for Platform or the company? Once you answer these questions, you have your argument for your leadership

I love the approach Kashmira described above, especially the 2nd bullet on asking whether this work would be part of the Platform org if you were starting from scratch. I have it kind of easy on my side because this is the 2nd time around for me and a lot of the incoming tech leadership here. We worked together for many years in a past gig, so I know how the engineering leads operate and the head of ops, and our CTO has supported the vision of how we should operate as a technology org from day 1.

That’s a nice environment!! We all have our intentions in the right place, just missing the bandwidth, and at times crossed communication. That said, if you’re ever looking for a PM in the platform space, i’ll raise my hand 😉

https://www.prodvana.io/blog/building-a-golden-path blog i referenced earlier