Nuts And Bolts Of Building A Platform Team

Presenter: Stacy Gorelik (Dir. Engineering at Flatiron Health

Initial focus of any company or development team is finding a product market fit. Products are developed quickly; they are iterated on and changed continuously and there are frequently multiple products being developed at the same time.

A year or five down the road, you find yourself on a team of over a hundred engineers continuously fending off hungry customers that demand more and more from all of your products. At that point you realize that you can’t continue growing down the straight lines but must occasionally stand back, rethink, regroup, reassess. As a part of that reorganization platform teams get established and start serving internal rather than external customers.

These teams will inherit piles of legacy code, technical debt, lack of process, and the enormous operational burden of keeping the lights on while the product teams continue attacking customer features at full speed. There isn’t a single solution to this problem (otherwise everybody would be already doing it), but as you see the same patterns over and over again across multiple organizations, certain themes do emerge.

In this talk I would like to cover a few different components that need to be paid attention to in the platformization effort, as well as some techniques and gotchas around them.