Is the optimal size of a platform team… zero? • Brian Guthrie • PlatformCon 2022

If you're in the business of turning money into software so you can make more money, every dollar spent on a platform engineer is a dollar you can't spend on delivering features. So why do we need them? In this talk I'll walk through the economics of platform teams and explain how to use that framework to add leverage to the business and build support for the work. I'll also describe why I decommissioned a platform team once and why I brought it back.

Some takeaways:
- Understanding the opportunity cost of platform work is critical to figuring out how to position your team, find leverage, and prioritize.
- Perception of value is important—it's not enough to add value, the value must be well-understood.
- There are (at least) three different kinds of platform teams—understanding which one you're doing is critical to explaining where the value comes from.

Speaker: Brian Guthrie, Co-Founder & CTO at Orgspace.

Bio: Brian Guthrie is co-founder and CTO at Orgspace. Prior to Orgppace, he was first Head of Platform and VP of Engineering at Meetup. He’s worked on and led teams in software domains as diverse as digital music, educational data, board games, and pizza delivery. Brian lives with two small children in a shoebox in Brooklyn.