This document discusses developing platforms by taking a capabilities perspective rather than a product perspective. It argues that viewing development through the lenses of business, capabilities, and people allows for synergies across products and more optimal allocation of work. By consolidating demands and expertise into shared backlogs and allowing cross-team collaboration, multiple teams can work together to build reusable capabilities that emerge into a platform. This approach helps overcome organizational barriers to platform development imposed by traditional product-aligned structures.

1. The Art of Platform
Development
Brian O’Neill
Lead Architect, Health Market Science
@boneill42, bone@alumni.brown.edu

2. What’s the goal?
Make our products look like they
were built by one team.
Change “product development” into
an exercise of capabilities
composition.

3. Platform Development
• Requires a composition of
perspectives:
• Business Perspective
• Capabilities Perspective
• People Perspective

4. The Business Perspective
ID Desire Opport Cost
unity
1 Make a google-like service to search all tweets ever $3M $500K
for specific words.
2 Make it possible to search for tweeters geospatially. $1.5 $250K
3 Enable tweeting via voice recognition. $2M $750K
4 Enable voice navigation of tweets. $1M $800K
5 Make it possible for to perform faceted search on $5M $500K
tweets (by age, gender, etc.)

5. Why do we need more?
This perspective estimates costs in
isolation.
BUT! Items may overlap functionally,
making subsequent epics cheaper.
• If you truly plan to do all, reality might
be…
ID Desire Opportunity Cost
1 Make a google-like service to search all $3M $500K
tweets ever for specific words.
2 Make it possible to search for tweeters $1.5 $50K (-$200K)
geospatially.
5 Make it possible for to perform faceted $5M $50K (-$450K)
search on tweets (by age, gender, etc.)

6. The Capabilities Perspective
Desire Supports Cost (points)
Business
Objective
Create real-time index of all tweets. (1), (2), (5) 13
Add geospatial information to the index. (2) 5
Add gender and age to the index. (5) 5
Enable voice recognition interface. (3), (4) 20
Capture tweets via voice recognition. (3) 13
Capture voice commands to navigate tweets. (4) 5

7. Planning
The capabilities perspective allows us
to recognize synergies.
It also decouples the development
from the specific use.
(which encourages a platform perspective)

8. Initial state
Independent product backlogs with
an 1:1 between backlog and team
Product 1
Product 1 Product 2
Product 2 Product 3
Product 3 Product 4
Product 4
Team 1
Team 1 Team 2
Team 2 Team 3
Team 3 Team 4
Team 4

9. The Challenges
Platform perspective must be imposed
upon the teams since it is absent from
the artifacts.
We locally optimize within each silo,
instead of optimizing effort based on
demand for capabilities.
To deliver a platform, we need to swim
upstream against Conway’s Law.

10. A potential change…
Consolidated into a capabilities
backlog, 1:n between backlog and
team.
Business Demand
Business Demand
Red
Red Blue
Blue Green
Green Yellow
Yellow
Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team

11. Team Dynamics
Leverage an “open-source” approach to platform
development.
Any team can work on anything.
Any team can contribute to any platform component.
Github helps here: “gating” commits via pull requests
Red
Red Blue
Blue Green
Green Yellow
Yellow
Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team
Pull Requests!
The “Platform
The “Platform

12. The People Perspective
Ideally, any team would be able to
tackle any story and implement
front-to-back, but…
All teams are not created equal,
expertise differs based on team
composition.

13. e.g.
Business Demand
Business Demand
Red
Red Blue
Blue Green
Green Yellow
Yellow
Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team
html5 1 html5 10 html5 5 html5 3
C* 5 C* 1 C* 10 C* 2
SOLR 9 SOLR 1 SOLR 3 SOLR 3
Consolidating demand allows us to give the right
work to the right team based on expertise, not product
line.

14. The People Perspective
We can quantify demand for expertise
in the backlog.
Desire Supports Cost Skill Set
Business (points) Required
Objective
Create real-time index of all tweets. (1), (2), (5) 13 SOLR
Add geospatial information to the index. (2) 5 SOLR
Add gender and age to the index. (5) 5 SOLR
Enable voice recognition interface. (3), (4) 20 HTML5
Capture tweets via voice recognition. (3) 13 HTML5
Capture voice commands to navigate (4) 5 HTML5
tweets.

15. Enables better planning…
Business demand for expertise will
change over time.

16. Enables conversations like…
• “Maybe we should give story X to the
team M to ramp them on technology P,
because we have a lot of the work
coming.”
Or…
• “Since we don’t have much need for
technology Z, let’s just re-sequence the
work as not to hit the learning curve on
more than one team.”

17. Controlling the Chaos:
Accountability
Business Demand
Business Demand
Red
Red Blue
Blue Green
Green Yellow
Yellow
Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team Team
Team
html5 1 html5 10 html5 5 html5 3
C* 5 C* 1 C* 10 C* 2
SOLR 9 SOLR 1 SOLR 3 SOLR 3
Product
Product Product
Product Product
Product Product
Product
Accountability
Accountability 1
1 2
2 3
3 4
4
Like expertise, accountability differentiates the teams.
But it does NOT define them. (or what they work on)

18. The Product Definition Forum
http://www.slideshare.net/dhaval.r.panchal/keeping-product-backlog-healthy

19. The Agile Platform Recipe
Take your business demand.
Pivot the demand to focus on
capabilities.
Add in the requisite expertise.
Sequence the work to optimize for
productivity and value.
Sit back and watch the platform emerge.

20. Advanced Topics

21. The Architectural Approach
http://www.rallydev.com/sites/default/files/principles_of_agile_architecture.pdf