Hi everyone, how does your platform team handle tools created by developers on other teams that could potentially be used outside of their team? Do you ignore them? Take ownership of them? Something in between?

Take ownership if possible. Also - we treat all our tools as open source, so if developers have any good ideas, they can create PRs for it.

If it isn't possible (take ownership), try the other way around, start to contribute to get context and help the creators to scale the usage across the org. This can help you later to defend that this is a tool that need to be officially supported by the platform team and prioritize in our roadmap and get new budget (if need) to grow the team to support.

Depends… on the popularity of the tool, is it competing with something we already have, is it better and more popular than what we already have. Do we have capacity to support further development on the tool or would more development happen in the team it originated in. We might take the tool on if the original contributors move on form them company. Another option might be if you have open head count to bring one of the original contributors into your team. Ultimately what should guide you is whether value is being delivered to the dev so they can deliver value to the customer. If you take the tool on and it gets neglected that's a bad outcome.

Thanks for the helpful replies! Sometimes I find out about these tools as they're being created and wonder how much I should try to influence them. Tough to do without feeling like I'm stifling the creator's creativity.