The when, how and why of building your first platform team • George Hantzaras • PlatformCon 2022

A platform is defined as the collection of tools and infrastructure, on top of which you can use and scale software. Over the last decade due to the increasing number of technology-driven startups and the shift towards cloud-based delivery models, platforms became mainstream and still information is scattered and ambiguous when it comes to describing team topologies and organizational patterns for platform teams in tech-driven startups. Companies are now focusing more than ever on building platform teams in order to increase productivity, promote software development standards, and reduce costs. But when is the right time to build this team? How does this team interact with product development teams? How is platform engineering interacting with product management?

In this presentation we will start by discussing when is the right time to build a platform team. We’ll then explore what is the team and organizational structure to support this team and what type of engineers you need. The presentation will then go over the important aspect of platform communication and interaction with product teams, and how you can avoid conflicts and competing priorities. Finally, we’ll see how alternative practices - like Innersourcing, can accelerate your platform journey and adoption.

Speaker: George Hantzaras, Director, Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix Systems.

Bio: George is a distributed systems expert and a hands-on engineering leader with focus on delivering B2B cloud services at scale. He is the Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix, coming from a DevOps background, he focuses on implementing SRE at enterprise scale working with cloud native technologies. In the past, he has been an entrepreneur, and has worked as a venture partner for venture capital firms in the United Kingdom and Greece and as an advisor to early-stage startups. He is an active participant in the entrepreneurial and tech community by hosting meet-ups, and providing mentorship to young aspiring professionals. He has been organizing the Athens Cloud Computing Meetup since 2016 and the Athens Hashicorp User Group. Most recently, he has been a speaker at global events like Hashiconf, DeveloperWeek, Voxxed Days, DevNexus and more, focusing on platform and cloud engineering, agile leadership, scaling engineering teams, and entrepreneurship.