Managing Platform Teams: How to Build and Structure Platform Engineering?

Episode Overview

• This episode defines the role and scope of modern platform engineering teams, differentiating them from traditional infrastructure and product teams.
• It explores the dual responsibilities of a platform team: proactively anticipating the technology needs of product teams and reactively driving necessary modernization and legacy system migrations.
• The conversation covers the natural tensions that arise between platform and product teams, particularly around forced upgrades and the emergence of "shadow IT."
• It advocates for a partnership mindset, where platform teams act as enablers rather than gatekeepers, guiding innovation to create leverage and allow product engineers to focus on business value.

Key Concepts

• Defining Platform Teams: A platform team builds and maintains the shared, reusable software infrastructure (e.g., build/test platforms, managed compute) that other engineering teams in the company rely on. This is distinct from historical infrastructure teams that focused on physical hardware.
• The Dual Role: Platform teams must balance proactive work, like staying ahead of the technology curve to anticipate future needs, with reactive work, such as driving migrations off legacy systems (e.g., Python 2 to 3) to ensure security and stability.
• "Paving the Roads" Analogy: This metaphor describes the essential but often unglamorous work of maintenance and upgrades. Neglecting this "roadwork" leads to "potholes" like security vulnerabilities, instability, and technical debt.
• Shadow IT: This occurs when product teams, seeing the platform team as a bottleneck or being unaware of existing solutions, build their own platform-like tools. This results in duplicated effort and a maintenance burden that they often try to "throw over the wall" to the platform team later.
• Enabler vs. Gatekeeper: An effective platform team avoids being a bottleneck by partnering with innovative teams. Instead of saying "no" to new technologies, they guide experiments, learn from them, and determine if the new tech is a viable candidate for a future, centrally-supported platform.
• The Value of Centralization: The core purpose of a platform team is to create leverage. When multiple teams are solving the same infrastructure problems independently, centralizing that work frees up product engineers to focus on building business and product features.

Quotes

• At 2:56 - "The platform team really is the software infrastructure portion of the team." - Fournier gives a concise, foundational definition of a platform team.
• At 4:21 - "We build things that we expect to be used by multiple different groups... but it's not supposed to be kind of just bespoke one-off tools for people." - Fournier clarifies that the work of a platform team is intended to be shared and scalable across the organization.
• At 22:13 - "You've got to pave the roads, or else you get potholes. And it's the same with your software." - An analogy for why platform-driven maintenance and upgrades are crucial, even if they aren't glamorous.
• At 24:35 - "I don't want to be a bottleneck... If somebody's like, excited about trying a new system... I would rather be there with them... and learn from the experience." - Explaining the mindset of an enabling platform team that prefers to partner with early adopters rather than simply blocking them.
• At 42:08 - "you shouldn't be thinking about operating Kubernetes, you should be thinking about the product you're engineering." - Capturing the core value proposition of a platform team: freeing product engineers to focus on business logic by abstracting away infrastructure concerns.

Takeaways

• The primary function of a platform team is to create leverage, allowing product engineers to deliver business value faster by abstracting away underlying infrastructure complexity.
• Effective platform teams must embrace a dual role, proactively building for the future while reactively managing the long tail of legacy technology.
• To prevent friction and "shadow IT," platform teams should adopt an enabler mindset, partnering with product teams to guide innovation rather than acting as a gatekeeper.
• The work of platform teams is essential maintenance for the company's technology stack; like "paving the roads," it prevents future problems and ensures long-term stability and security.