Savvy organizations 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 organization adopt this approach?
In this talk, Manuel Pais, co-author of the book Team Topologies, explains why the platform-as-product approach can be a game-changer for organizations 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 - Manuel explains how organizations like Uswitch and Adidas have successfully used the platform-as-product model to accelerate and simplify the delivery of software at scale.
2. Team Topologies
5
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press, 2019
teamtopologies.com/book
3. “innovative tools and concepts for
structuring the next generation
digital operating model”
Charles T. Betz,
Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
6
4. Remote Team Interactions
Workbook
7
Using Team Topologies
Patterns for Remote Working
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press, 2022
Available to pre-order now
teamtopologies.com/workbook
5. “extends the original book with
valuable exercises to setup your
teams effectively for a
Remote First world”
Stefan van Oirschot,
Chief Digital Advisor at Red Hat
8
6. What is “Platform as a
Product” and why should I
adopt this approach?
9
7. 10
What is a Platform?
What is a Product?
Examples: P-as-a-P
Getting Started
9. “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
12
Source: https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html
10. “Create a path of
least resistance.
Make the right thing
the easiest thing to do.”
– Evan Bottcher, 2018
24
12. 26
“Not every platform team is automatically
successful, but the successful ones treat
their platform as a product.”
13. 27
“need to address organizational and team
aspects, namely helping teams clarify their
mission, primary customers, interfaces, and
what makes for healthy team interactions”
24. 56
Thinnest Viable Platform
A small, curated set of complementary
services or patterns to use together to
simplify and accelerate delivery.
“Use these N services in these ways...”
Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash
27. “product (...) is anything that can
be offered to a market to satisfy
the desire or need of a customer”
- Wikipedia
67
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(business)
50. 102
Low-level AWS service calls (EC2, IAM, STS, Autoscaling, etc.) from January 2015 to January 2017
51. “People were spending more time
having to interact with relatively
low-level services thus spending
their time on relatively low-value
decisions.”
- Paul Ingles
103
52. “We didn’t change our organization
because we wanted to use
Kubernetes, we used Kubernetes
because we wanted to change
our organization.”
- Paul Ingles
104
54. “We wanted to scale our teams but
maintain the principles of what
helped us move fast: autonomy,
work with minimal coordination,
self-service infrastructure.”
- Paul Ingles
111
56. 119
2018
Infra platform
started with few
services
First customer
(centralized
logging, metrics,
auto scaling)
2019
Started using SLAs
and SLOs, clarifying
reliability/latency/etc
Growing traffic in
platform vs AWS
57. 122
...
Addressed critical
cross-functional
needs (GDPR,
security, alerts +
SLOs as a service)
Finally adopted by
the highest eng
maturity & biz
revenue team
2018
Infra platform
started with few
services
First customer
(centralized
logging, metrics,
auto scaling)
2019
Started using SLAs
and SLOs, clarifying
reliability/latency/etc
Growing traffic in
platform vs AWS