3 Practices to ensure a smooth Platform Engineering adoption
I had the chance to join to other amazing group of professionals to talk about my success keys for implementing Platform Engineering, thanks to Mark Pawlikowski for accepting my submit to participate in the Conf42 2023 - Platform Engineering event.
During this session I commented how to increase the chances of success with just 3 proven practices that will help to face the challenges behind building and adopting platform teams, everything based on my researches and experiences. These 3 practices are:
- Customer-centric leadership: eventhough it sounds more as a mindset, this practice relies on have a clear vision of the internal or external customer that the platform team will attend, so it’s about generating customer-centric mindset in practice. Then, for implementing it’s required a transformation leader with Design Thinking skills, becaus this person will guide the whole team to understand the final user and his needs.
- Practice waht you preach: the best way to test not only service provided, but also documentation and support lines.
- Form champions: usually to build a platform it’s required more than one technology, and service ends providing a set of technologies as well. Form, or even hire, engineers with all required knowledge is hard, so having a T-shaped team format everyone in the platform team must be generalist in all techs used and offered, but each one should go deeper with certifications and training, then they can provide specialized guidance and maintain updated the documentation.
If you missed this session, or wanna check it again, the recording is available in Youtube:
Furthermore, the slides are available here in the page of the event.
I also had the chance to present this talk in DevOpsDays Medellin 2023, unfortunately they didn’t record the session.
What do you think? do you agree with me, are these practices keys to successfuly form Platform teams? left your comments below.