The brilliant practice of balanced platform teams
Treat your platform as a product and give it an empowered team
On unicorns and rainbows
On September 2, 2020 I had the honor of co-presenting The Brilliant Practice of Balanced Platform Teams with Christie Lynam, Samah Majadla, and Christopher Pittman. We built upon what Becki Hyde presented in 2019 with her Making Magic with Balanced Teams. Becki introduced the idea that design, engineering, and product management are the primary colors you can use to get the full range of colors you need to run your product. We talked about how, especially for IT cloud platforms, these are not the only primary colors you can use.
If you run an IT cloud platform team, you likely do not have a full-time designer. To make things work well, with fast communication and a bias toward action, you can get things done with someone from infrastructure or security on-hand. Or a former developer who understands your customers’ needs.
Here’s the pitch
Running a modern platform can be messy. We face ever-increasing stakes, uncertainty, and complexity. It only gets harder when platform teams work in isolation from their stakeholders (not always by choice). Does this sound familiar? Does it make you a little sad inside? There is hope.
A balanced team can give your platform the unicorn magic it needs to take flight and rescue you from the gloom. A balanced team is like painting with all the colors of the rainbow (if, for example, InfoSec or QA actually came in colors). Most importantly, a balanced platform team will simplify the lives of your developers.
Christie Lynam, Samah, Majadla, Taj Moore, and Christopher Pittman will share practical lessons from their years of herding cats and building IT platforms teams with VMware Pivotal Labs.
You’ll learn methods you can apply right away, as well as long-term strategies that ensure your team will possess the skill sets and creative tension that build great (even magical) platforms.
There’s a lot more wisdom to glean in the presentation. Go check it out! https://springone.io/2020/sessions/the-brilliant-practice-of-balanced-platform-teams.
You can also watch it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/16QerCqKndU.
A special thanks goes to my co-presenters. I invited the perfect people to create this talk; we made something greater than any one of us could have done on our own.
