The 12 Platform Challenges - recap

Back in early December 2022, we set ourselves the challenge of putting together a series of blogs describing the top 12 Platform Challenges that our team has experienced, working across platform teams of all shapes and sizes. And we did it!!

You can find the full set of blogs listed below:

1. A Small Team Supporting a Big Platform

2. Time Pressure Makes a Full Platform Rewrite Unlikely

3. You Can’t Buy What Only You Need

4. Cognitive Load Has Shifted to Your Team

5. Not All Service Experts Are on the Platform Team

6. Codifying Your Business

7. Maintaining Consistency Across Software Teams

8. Enabling High Performing Teams to Safely Stretch Beyond Platform Defaults

9. App Teams Need to Learn Platform Tools

10. Not All Services Are on Kubernetes

11. Scaling the Platform Beyond a Single Kubernetes Cluster

12. Managing a Multi-cloud Platform

After reading all of the great blogs that the team wrote, my personal key takeaways are:

• A self-service internal platform is critical to increasing developer productivity and business value. By providing a clear API and offering a consistent set of tools and experiences, the platform team can successfully enable multiple teams.

• The platform must meet the needs of its users; collaboration between platform builders and platform users is as important now as it ever was. DevOps is not dead, it is evolving, and applying product management practices to the internal platform ensures the platform can grow and evolve to meet changing business needs.

• Only you can build your platform. Your business, your teams, your practices are all unique to you and by encoding this into your platform, you can make it easy for teams to follow the right path and avoid duplication, complication, and waste. Having a platform that is composable means you can provide differing levels of abstraction to support multiple tools, skill sets, and needs across your organisation.

As we kick off 2023 we’d love to hear feedback on the challenges that we’ve set out and also learn about other platform challenges that teams are facing. If you’d like to continue the conversation, please get in touch!