Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms @ CraftConf, May 2023

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While we have made great strides in the last decade to break down silos in Engineering, in most organizations when you look outside there is still an abyss of understanding between teams sitting in different divisions in the organization. This can significantly slow down the flow of value to our customers, directly and indirectly. You’ve likely experienced at least one of these in your professional career… Not being allowed to use the right tool for the job because of a strict procurement process. Spending half a day to get a 20€ expense approved and reimbursed. Or a much anticipated employee onboarding portal that ends up being just a UI on top of the 73 steps and 14 approvals required to set up an employee workstation. None of this happens in bad faith, it just turns out traditionally teams and groups are incentivized for outputs, the more cycles you can run and the faster you can close requests the better. So we end up optimizing internal processes at the cost of company outcomes. I posit that, ultimately, this happens because teams don’t see each other as customers. You might be thinking “But they’re not our customers, they’re our colleagues!”. Also true. The key here is that every team, every division in an organization can adopt a platform mindset in which they treat what they offer to other teams as an internal product. That means other teams become your customers. Certainly there are particular dynamics at play when your customers are your peers as well but fundamentally the core principles of the “platform as a product” approach translate well across the organization. We have seen this work well inside engineering, and we start to see it in other domains of the business as well: data science & business intelligence, but also leadership, marketing, legal, HR, etc. We will cover some early examples during this talk and think ahead to what the future holds for platforms beyond engineering.

TeamTopologies.com
@TeamTopologies
Beyond Engineering:
The Future of Platforms
Manuel Pais
co-author of Team Topologies
Craft Conference - 19 May 2023
Photo by Gomez Daniel

Team Topologies
2
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast ﬂow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press (2019)
https://teamtopologies.com

“My own deﬁnition of DevOps:
Everything you do to overcome the
friction between silos.
All the rest is plain engineering.”
– Patrick Debois, 2021
The DevOps Handbook (2nd edition)
3

7
How (much) do the ways of
working outside Engineering
impact fast ﬂow?

12
→ Lack of
autonomy
→ Conﬂicts
→ Frustration
→ Disengaging

13
Teams tend to optimize for
low-value internal processes
over high-value outcomes

“A digital platform is a foundation of
self-service APIs, tools, services,
knowledge and support which are
arranged as a compelling internal
product.”
– Evan Bottcher, 2018
https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html
15

16
Platform as a product
→ Treat teams as customers
→ Platform as a product
→ Treat teams as customers

17
Platform mindset as a
pattern for “overcoming
friction between silos”

18
Data Mesh is a domain centric
data architecture and an
operating model where
data is treated as a product.

Four principles of Data Mesh
19
Domain
ownership
Data as a
product
Self-service
data
platforms
Federated
governance
https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh-principles.html

26
Engineering Platforms
What we got right
(so far)

27
Platforms focused on the
user experience (DevEx)

29
Platforms as key to
manage cognitive load
at scale

30
“Highly evolved ﬁrms use a
combination of stream-aligned
and platform teams as the
most eﬀective way to
manage cognitive load at scale”

31
Platform as a
coherent set of services

33
Platform teams with
extensive
product experience

34
Platform teams with
extensive relevant
product experience

35
Platform teams with
extensive relevant some
product experience

36
Engineering Platforms
What we’re
still missing

38
Rigid platform boundaries
block teams and
increase cognitive load

39
Education is part of
the user experience

40
A focus on helpful, proven
patterns leads to a needs-
based “thin” platform

41
Need to be mindful of
cognitive load
on platform teams

42
Adopt approaches that
clarify team focus &
simplify interactions

43
Trust boundaries
strongly impact
platform eﬀectiveness

44
Platform org design & comms
need to be
optimized for high trust

“It's not autonomy doing what you
want, it's agency to operate with
safety - within the encoded values
that are jointly shared.”
– Byron Miller (RedHat)
https://twitter.com/byron_miller/status/1583429784595415040
72

74
1) Prioritize fast ﬂow of
value to (end) customers

75
2) Unblock others
through (curated)
self-service patterns

77
3) Our platform is open
to change, collaborate to
discover new needs

4) Optimize for adoption
and discoverability
78

5) Enable others by
meeting them where
they are today
79

82
Copyright © Team Topologies Ltd 2023. All rights reserved.
teamtopologies.com

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Since the book Team Topologies was published in 2019, organizations around the world have started to adopt Team Topologies principles and practices like Stream-aligned teams, modern platforms, well-defined team interactions, and team cognitive load as a key driver for fast software delivery and operations. We will look at examples from these organizations: - Footasylum gives fashion-focused youth a multi-branded retail experience mixing global sportswear household names with emerging brands and its own stable of in-house labels. Founded in 2005, Footasylum now has 70 stores across the UK and a thriving ecommerce platform, with revenue of £260m per annum and over 2500 employees. Footasylum used Team Topologies patterns to revolutionize their ecommerce platform. - PureGym is Britain’s largest gym chain - the first to gain over 1 million members. As PureGym expanded, so did the need for software to enable their members to book and manage gym sessions. Since 2019, PureGym has re-aligned its teams and team interactions based on Team Topologies patterns, helping to scale the engineering teams and improve flow. - uSwitch / RVU, one of the UK’s leading consumer price comparison websites, has grown a modern platform from scratch, allowing stream-aligned teams to focus on consumers needs, offloading infrastructure provisioning concerns to the platform which also provides cross-cutting services around scalability, security and data management - Wealth Wizards is a UK company making financial advice affordable and accessible to everyone through online tools and apps. The engineering division at Wealth Wizards has used the Team Topologies ideas around team cognitive load to help right-size their teams and align teams to the most important flows of business change. For each of these examples, we explore how the ideas and patterns in Team Topologies were useful to the organization and the results of the changes.

Playing Tetris with Cognitive Load @ Craft Conference, Jun 2021

Manuel Pais

Autonomous empowered cross-functional product teams. Sounds like a dream team, doesn’t it? So what does this mean for software delivery teams? Do we expect such a team to set up their CI/CD tooling and pipelines, automate infra, test and secure *all the things*, and, of course, run and monitor their product live? Oh wait, there’s more: they need to actually understand who their customers are, what they need from the product, what is causing friction, and what is the viability of our product as a net positive for the organization. Sounds familiar? Congratulations, you’re already playing Tetris with cognitive load! Want to know more about team cognitive load and how we can make use of effective team topologies and interactions to balance and minimize the cognitive load across an ecosystem of teams. Join this talk and climb up the cognitive load Tetris ranking with the help of one of the co-authors of the book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow!

Product Teams Need a Family Too! @ New Ways of Working - Modern Agile in Well...

Manuel Pais

Are you trying to move from agile project teams to business-aligned product teams? Everyone from the CEO to middle management is on board. Yet somehow it’s not that easy, is it? You’ve just about figured out how to split infrastructure responsibilities between teams when the next great tech for cost-effective scalability is out there and it doesn’t fit in the new model. Oh, and let’s not forget that products X and Y have no automated tests since they were developed by temporary project teams. The underlying questions are: What are the product team’s responsibilities? How do they interact with other teams and when? The fundamental team topologies provide a framework for thinking about and aligning teams with an expected set of behaviors and responsibilities. In other words, we are clarifying their purpose and ways of working. We recommend four fundamental team topologies, each with a well defined purpose and responsibilities. Along stream-aligned teams (of which product teams are a subset), the other three topologies recommended are platform, enabling, and complicated subsystem. This family of topologies provides the support system necessary for product teams to thrive. In this talk we will see what each of these topologies brings to the table and how they enable organizations to quickly evolve and respond to both new technology and business requirements over time.

Avoiding the CI/CD Monolith with Team Design & Evolution @ London CD meetup, ...

Manuel Pais

We often talk about monoliths at the application and database level. However, there are many other manifestations: monolithic tooling, monolithic infrastructure, monolithic releases, monolithic testing, and even monolithic thinking. In my experience, more than legacy technology or architecture, the emergence of monoliths often comes down to a lack of purposeful team design and evolution. Conway’s Law - the mirroring effect between team structures and dependencies and the resulting system design - is no stranger to CI/CD. Once we acknowledge the socio-technical nature of software delivery, we consequently recognize the need for a team-centric, not tool-centric, approach for sustainable CI/CD. We start asking questions like: should every application team own and maintain their own instances and flavors of the CI/CD tooling (since it’s all codifiable now, right)? Or do we need a CI/CD team to handle the tooling and infrastructure for everyone else in the org so teams only have to worry about their own pipelines? Or something in between, like a CI/CD platform providing out-of-the-box solutions that can be customized by application teams to fit their specific needs? Just like we are advancing our tools to become easier to install, run and update, we also need to think about clarifying team interactions and responsibility boundaries for effective ownership and evolution of both the CI/CD system (it’s actually a product) and the application pipelines. Manuel Pais is co-author of Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. Recognized by TechBeacon as a DevOps thought leader, Manuel is an independent IT organizational consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices and accelerating flow.

Frozen DevOps? Team Topologies Comes to the Rescue! @ DevSecOps - London Gath...

Manuel Pais

Why are so many organizations stuck in the "middle" of DevOps evolution? What's preventing them from achieving higher levels of organizational performance despite all the automation, tooling, and good practices in place? Puppet's State of DevOps Report 2021 provides important research-based clues to answer these questions, supported by the patterns and recommendations in Team Topologies. In this talk we cover the self-imposed limitations of blindly following some “myths” around DevOps. Almost 80% of organizations are stuck in the "frozen middle" of DevOps evolution because of lack of organizational sensemaking abilities. The margin for growth for these organizations is tremendous, but they need to think beyond technical capabilities to unlock the potential of their teams to deliver with more autonomy and a sense of purpose. The data shows that Team Topologies provides the necessary organizational and team interaction patterns that help organizations achieve performance metrics such as delivering a new customer change request to live in under one hour, or diagnosing and recovering from a serious issue in production in under an hour. Get the State of DevOps Report 2021 here: https://puppet.com/resources/report/2021-state-of-devops-report To learn more about Team Topologies: https://teamtopologies.com/learn https://academy.teamtopologies.com

Platform Ecosystem and Layered Molular Architecture

Hiroshi Takahashi

When the digital technology penetrates universally, it affects the product architecture and the organizing logic of the enterprise, and also changes the information system and the form used by the enterprise. Therefore, IoT, AI, Big Data etc which are currently talked about must also be considered in line with such flow. As a new architecture, the layered modular architecture consisting of four layers of devices, networks, services, and contents is a hot topic. This also affects how enterprises organize innovation and provide services. There is also a paper that examines the direction of such changes by platform theory. Interestingly, when analyzing the relationship between developers outside the organization and platformers, developers exclusively set periods to earn with their own applications for a certain period of time in order to increase the incentive of developers . It incorporates rights holding close to a kind of patent on the platform. There is approaching platform governance that is evolving rapidly.

Playing Tetris with Cognitive Load @ Chile Ágil meetup, Oct 2022

Manuel Pais

Equipos de productos interfuncionales autónomos y empoderados. Suena como un equipo de ensueño, ¿no? Entonces, ¿qué significa esto para los equipos de entrega de software? ¿Esperamos que un equipo así configure sus herramientas y canalizaciones de CI/CD, automatice la infraestructura, pruebe y asegure *todas las cosas* y, por supuesto, ejecute y supervise su producto en vivo? Oh, espera, hay más: necesitan entender realmente quiénes son sus clientes, qué necesitan del producto, qué está causando fricción y cuál es la viabilidad de nuestro producto como un beneficio neto para la organización. ¿Suena familiar? ¡Enhorabuena, ya estás jugando al Tetris con carga cognitiva! Quiere saber más sobre la carga cognitiva del equipo y cómo podemos hacer uso de topologías e interacciones de equipo efectivas para equilibrar y minimizar la carga cognitiva en un ecosistema de equipos. ¡Únase a esta charla y ascienda en el ranking Tetris de carga cognitiva con la ayuda de uno de los coautores del libro Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow! Del expositor: Manuel Pais es coautor de Team Topologies: Organizando equipos de negocios y tecnología para un flujo rápido. Reconocido por TechBeacon como un líder de pensamiento de DevOps, Manuel es un consultor organizacional de TI independiente y trainer, centrado en las interacciones del equipo, las prácticas de entrega y la aceleración del flujo. Manuel también es instructor de LinkedIn en Continuous Delivery. Twitter: @manupaisable LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelpais/

Product Teams Need a Family Too! @ School of Product Ownership, Apr 2020 Meetup

Manuel Pais

What is platform as a product? Clues from Team Topologies - WTFinar with Cont...

Matthew Skelton

From a webinar on 29 April 2021 https://info.container-solutions.com/wtf-is-platform-as-product-2nd-edition Savvy organisations are discovering the value of treating their internal platforms as products. But what does it mean to treat a “platform as a product”? What benefits does this give, and why would an organisation adopt this approach? In this talk, [Matthew Skelton] [Manuel Pais], co-author of the book Team Topologies, explains why the platform-as-product approach can be a game-changer for organisations building and running software-enabled products and services. Using ideas & patterns from Team Topologies - including Thinnest Viable Platform, team cognitive load, and the evolutionary team interaction modes - [Matthew] [Manuel] explains how organisations like adidas and Uswitch have successfully used the platform-as-product model to accelerate and simplify the delivery of software at scale.

Frozen DevOps? Team Topologies Comes to the Rescue! @ DevOpsDays Poznan, Oct ...

Manuel Pais

Remote-first Team Interactions with Team Topologies (public online session Ap...

Manuel Pais

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