In this video we will learn what a platform team is and how it can help to scale a development team from a small team to a large team.
Check out the article version here:
https://dev.to/codingwithadam/what-is...
The platform team is responsible for supporting an internal product known as the platform. The platform is everything the development team needs to build and ship a product. The role of a platform team is to help grow and scale the software development team. The platform team does this by reducing the cognitive load on the development team. With a proper platform team the build teams can move fast and focus on providing the best product to the external customer.
What outputs does the platform team provide to help grow and scale the organizations software development department?
The following list is not comprehensive but outlines a few items that a platform can output:
Technology Roadmap
Documentation of architecture
Establish patterns and practices
Architecture decisions
Monitor and track Tech Debt
The following is a list of platform team responsibilities. This list can be used as a guide to determine if a request should be a platform objective or build team objective.
Is it Cross Cutting?
Is it Strategic?
Is it Frequent?
Is it related to Dev Experience?
Does the platform team focus on architecture while the build team focuses on features?
No and Yes
Build teams should think about performance, scalability, security, logging etc. The caveat is around how the work is distributed and how it is tracked. Ownership would be on the platform team but execution could be done within build teams or platform teams depending on the allocation of resources. In the diagram above the platform team uses 70% of their time for platform and 30% for feature work. The build teams on the other hand use 70% on feature work and 30% on platform work.
Conclusion
As with any best practice, it is best to select those areas that work for your team. This is often what most teams will do with agile software development selecting those parts of agile that work for them. Feel free to do the same with platform teams.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:13 Build Teams
01:22 Architecture and Dev Experience
02:37 Platform Team
04:05 Platform Output
04:05 Platform Responsibilities
05:59 Work Allocation
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