Part VII: Organizing for Platforms
Platform technology can be complex, and building one requires significant technical expertise. However, addressing sociotechnical aspects, handling the dynamics between people and untangling the organizational knot, are equally relevant. Whether you are setting up a platform team without a platform or building one, leaving these aspects unaddressed spells doom for even the most technically brilliant platform.
Rather than work off service tickets, as would be the case in traditional IT organizations, platform teams enable development teams without injecting themselves into the inner loop of feature delivery. But this doesn’t mean that platform teams work in isolation; rather, it’s the opposite: they must be connected to parts of the organization as diverse as product engineering, operations, IT and business leadership, HR, and finance. That’s why staffing and structuring a platform team isn’t easy.
This part provides guidance on how to structure platform teams, the skills they need, and how they interact with other teams:
- Running a platform team can be like running a small company.
- A platform needs well-defined interfaces and align along two axes.
- Platform teams are well advised to place the customer at the center.
- Some platform teams can achieve benefits without actually building a platform.