Why You Should Run Your Platform Team Like a Product Team>
The New Stack.io – Gerald Yerden II
Platform teams focus on building and maintaining core systems and workflows for delivering infrastructure and other services to application teams. Since applications run on the foundation of infrastructure, supporting infrastructure is a big job. Not only does platform engineering encompass what you would traditionally think of as âinfrastructureâ â virtual machines, compute clusters and networking â it also includes all the glue that binds the worlds of applications and infrastructure. These include APIs, monitoring, CI/CD pipelines, credential management and more. All these things centralized under one umbrella comprise the âplatformâ in âplatform team.â
Platform teams address a historical problem with infrastructure provisioning and configuration. In cloud-based environments, infrastructure is being automated and spun up in a matter of minutes. New features are getting built and deployed to production in a matter of days.
Besides supporting application teams, platform teams also have the responsibility of ensuring that the workflows they build remain compliant with industry and company standards in the face of this acceleration. In the same way that product teams have to gather feedback from their customers and listen to key stakeholders, platform teams need to collaborate with application teams while also meeting requirements from security, compliance, finance, etc.
While this means platform teams need to sometimes keep developer requests from straying outside of those stakeholdersâ boundaries, itâs more often the case, in my experience, that many organizations will continue to build legacy compliance processes around manual changes to infrastructure that do not align well with modern automation practices.
Product teams understand they serve a customer and that the customerâs constant feedback is crucial. So, who is the platform teamâs customer. Application development teams.
Platform teams need to establish feedback loops with their users before they start building the platform. They need requirements, scoping and prioritization. Treat the platform-building process like any other software project. Take an iterative approach and never consider the platform âdone.â Donât forget all the battle-tested product management strategies the IT world Product teams must also understand the needs of their stakeholders. Stakeholders for the platform team include every other team that is part of the organizationâs infrastructure delivery pipeline.
Link: https://thenewstack.io/why-you-should-run-your-platform-team-like-a-product-team/