Platform teams are tough work. The idea sounds great, but the day-to-day is hard. Someone recently reached out for advice with this common scenario. If you are a platform team member, you might find this helpful. Otherwise, consider forwarding it if you know a team in this situation.
One addition is to learn about funding models. This may theoretically be “above your pay grade” as a line-manager, but in a platform team you have no choice.
Start by figuring out where your headcount (HC) is coming from. Who is paying your salary? You will often be surprised how much fragmented history you can uncover digging this up.
Study up on the different funding models. This can be “lending HC,” internal budget moves, something like the Amazon “Away Team” model, and more. Each has pros and cons, so make sure to understand the best practices for each model.
Then, you have to work with your leadership to get buy-in for a SMALL set of funding models that they will agree to. Solicit feedback from your stakeholders and leadership to get to one *published* document with the various acceptable options. Agree on an escalation path if none of the models work for a given request.
This is a great post. I want to hear your thoughts on this though... Having the idea of a platform team and request teams (we call them implementation teams) always sound like a winner at the start. But once you are invested and team members have to start jumping between the platform team and request teams, basically breaking the rule of your point #2 in the article, which way will you pivot if simply increasing resources is not possible, or at least not until the dream of the platform is fully realised?
What recommendations do you have for a newly minted platform team to avoid getting to this stage? I know many of them apply. Are there any others specifically for platform team who are not yet in that stage?
As an ex-Engineering manager of a platform team, this is gold. Thank you.
Thanks for this post!
One addition is to learn about funding models. This may theoretically be “above your pay grade” as a line-manager, but in a platform team you have no choice.
Start by figuring out where your headcount (HC) is coming from. Who is paying your salary? You will often be surprised how much fragmented history you can uncover digging this up.
Study up on the different funding models. This can be “lending HC,” internal budget moves, something like the Amazon “Away Team” model, and more. Each has pros and cons, so make sure to understand the best practices for each model.
Then, you have to work with your leadership to get buy-in for a SMALL set of funding models that they will agree to. Solicit feedback from your stakeholders and leadership to get to one *published* document with the various acceptable options. Agree on an escalation path if none of the models work for a given request.
This is a great post. I want to hear your thoughts on this though... Having the idea of a platform team and request teams (we call them implementation teams) always sound like a winner at the start. But once you are invested and team members have to start jumping between the platform team and request teams, basically breaking the rule of your point #2 in the article, which way will you pivot if simply increasing resources is not possible, or at least not until the dream of the platform is fully realised?
What recommendations do you have for a newly minted platform team to avoid getting to this stage? I know many of them apply. Are there any others specifically for platform team who are not yet in that stage?