Last week, Manuel Pais and Laura Tacho discussing platform success they said:
Figure out what your company cares about.
How to Structure Your Platform Team
What the company cares about is the impact that you want your platform to create. It can be saving money, faster releases or something completely different. But sometimes, even if you manage to identify what they care about or even better find a way to quantify your contribution to move the needle, the results might be underwhelming.
Why costs weren’t reduced more? Why do developers still leave the company? Why wasn’t this security leak prevented?
In my opinion, it is easier to express success as well as to make better decisions when deciding on new platform capabilities, by taking into consideration three factors:
- Balanced costs
- Out-of-the-box compliance
- Frictionless Development Experience
Balanced Costs
Money is something that most business people understand and platform capabilities have a unique way to reduce or skyrocket the bill for a company. For example, delivering a platform capability that eliminates duplicate implementations that have hardware and personnel costs, saves money. On the other hand, if the proposed capability is as expensive or even more expensive than what is in place right now, then you have just added the transition costs to the check.
Out-of-the-box compliance
In all environments, regulated or not, you have a minimum set of compliance rules you need to adhere to. For example, as an organization you probably want to make it as easy as possible to deliver secure products. Platform capabilities that “make the right thing boring” contribute to better delivery flow as they remove the friction of requiring a specialist in the field. Nevertheless, compliance capabilities that are unnecessary limiting can cause more delays and problems than the benefits you bring.
Frictionless Development Experience
Platform capabilities are not the only factor to improve development experience. Development processes or product management work (here is an older post on this), also play a significant role. Nevertheless, they are in a unique position to influence it for the better or worse. Imagine a platform capability that is cumbersome to use but is the “preferred company solution” one, even if it is not mandatory. Of course, on the bright side imagine having platform capabilities that are a delight to use and everyone in the company is familiar with. Switching teams or onboarding new colleagues becomes a breeze.
All three of these ingredients need to be combined in meaningful dosage to produce impactful platform capabilities. You can provide the best user experience but if it is too expensive and not compliant, you have an issue. The same if providing the cheapest solution that no one understands and it might or not fulfill compliance rules.
Going back to the impact, having a visualization (preferably something better than my doodle) helps to communicate not only the delivered value but also the not so obvious additional benefits.
And if you can think of a fourth or fifth ingredient to add to the mix, make sure to mention what is that extra flavour that everyone likes.
More Questions Than Answers 