Re:TeamTopologies
by tsimionescu on Friday July 28, 2023 @06:02AM
(#36904832)
I think we are mostly in agreement - platforms are good, but they should be driven by product teams who see value in them and feel empowered to improve and maintain them when needed. Whether there is also a dedicated platform team or it is more of a group collaboration between product teams is ultimately a detail, as long as the product teams do participate in building and maintaining the platform.
Sorry in advanced if I state this a little bluntly, but this rhetoric of teams going off and building the same tools all over the place is in my experience not a fault of any team, it's that of the context/organisation they operate in. Framing it as such is IMO destructive for company culture. As if product teams, left to their own, will just degrade into building sub-par platform-esk tools that ruin the org. I don't buy it. Trying to make one thing do two things (the single source of tech complexity) is a trap often catching platform engineers who try to tailor to an audience that is not unified in their needs, still platform teams are incentivised to create just that.