Building Microservices - The Platform Team 19 / 12 / 2023

A beautiful section from Building Microservices from Sam Newman about The Platform Team.

Why exists? What’s the purpose?

A platform needs someone to run and manage it. These technology stacks can be complex enough to warrant some specific expertise. My concern, though, is that on occasion it can be too easy for platform teams to lose sight of why they exist.

Who is the stakeholder?

A platform team has users, in the same way that any other team has users. The users of the platform team are other developers—your job, if you are in a platform team, is to make their lives easier (this of course is the job of any enabling team). That means that the platform you create needs to fit the needs of the teams using it. It also means that you need to work with the teams using your platform not only to help them use it well but also to take on board their feedback and requirements to improve the platform you deliver.

Thinking more widely about other ways to make developers’ lives easier.

In the past, I’ve preferred calling such a team something like “delivery services” or “delivery support” to better articulate its goal. Really, the job of a platform team isn’t to build a platform; it’s to make developing and shipping functionality easy. Building a platform is just one way that the members of a platform team can achieve this. I do worry that by calling themselves a platform team they will see all problems as things that can and should be solved by the platform, rather than thinking more widely about other ways to make developers’ lives easier.

Enabling team. Build bridges, not walls.

Like any good enabling team, a platform team needs to operate almost like an internal consultancy to some extent. If you are in a platform team, you need to be going out to find out what problems people are facing and working with them to help them get these problems fixed. But as you also end up building the platform too, you need to have a heavy dose of product development work in there as well. In fact, taking a product development approach to how you build out your platform is a great idea and could be a great place to help grow new product owners.