Overcoming bottlenecks of Platform Teams

Platform Teams became a known concept for speeding up software delivery thanks to Team Topologies, which defines Platform Teams as a team focused on reducing the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams by providing reusable services, APIs, infrastructure, etc. Inspired by Team Topologies, many organizations try to implement either the whole concept or a part of it but face various challenges. One of the biggest problems is that platform teams are becoming bottlenecks. In this talk, we’ll dive into systems thinking, organizational structure, stakeholder management, prioritization, and many other topics to understand how to move platform teams out of a bottleneck situation. We will talk about an example where I led the transformation of a cross-functional team into a platform team and overcame the bottleneck situation. I will share our challenges in a dynamic and changing organization, the mistakes we have made, and how we solved the bottleneck situation.