Platform teams are more like gardeners than builders 🌱

Platform teams are more like gardeners than builders 🌱

Gardeners prepare the soil, plant the seeds, tend conditions and adapt over time, just like platform teams.

Our soil is the platforms we build and the experience we offer to the other developer teams. We are not building the actual product to external customers, but we are making it easier for others to grow theirs.

Different teams sprout at different speeds. Some adopt our platform tools immediately, others take some more time. Pushing too hard is like pulling on a seedling to make it grow faster 🌿

Gardeners don’t generally control what grows to the tiniest detail, they create the conditions for growth. Similarly, a good platform team provides self-service capabilities and guardrails, not mandates. And it even allows the occasional wild seedling to open new paths 🌻

But we have to prune too ✂️ Deprecating old tooling, sunsetting legacy patterns, cleaning up tech debt, that is just as important as planting new things.

We measure success by what others harvest, not by what we planted. Platform team KPIs are about developer productivity, deployment frequency, time-to-first-deploy — outcomes in other teams 📊

And sometimes we plant something and it doesn’t take root. That Backstage plugin nobody used, the abstraction that was too opinionated. We learn, compost it and try again! ♻️

P.S. At least my home gardening progress this year seems to be on a good growth path, hoping for rich crops this year! 🌽🎃

Originally posted on LinkedIn.