Overcoming bottlenecks of Platform Teams

What if your platform team's success is creating your company's biggest bottleneck?

#1about 5 minutes

Using population growth to explain systems thinking

The history of human population growth illustrates how reinforcing and balancing feedback loops create bottlenecks in complex systems.

#2about 2 minutes

Identifying the platform team as a central bottleneck

A centralized platform serving many products with APIs and events can inherently become a bottleneck, slowing down the entire ecosystem.

#3about 3 minutes

Assessing the platform team's strengths and weaknesses

The team analyzed its reinforcing feedbacks like mission alignment and autonomy alongside balancing feedbacks like stakeholder disconnection.

#4about 2 minutes

Proactively managing stakeholder roadmaps and contributions

Shifting from a reactive approach to proactively sharing roadmaps and enabling other teams to contribute code helps align the entire ecosystem.

#5about 2 minutes

Developing product thinking within the engineering team

To build better solutions, engineers were given direct access to products and included in stakeholder meetings to foster deep product understanding.

#6about 2 minutes

Restructuring the team and improving technical architecture

The team addressed internal pressures by hiring a staff engineer, improving data model flexibility, and embedding platform engineers into product teams.

#7about 3 minutes

Accepting that bottlenecks are a continuous challenge

The key is to understand that systems are dynamic and the goal is not to eliminate all bottlenecks, but to continuously identify and resolve the next one.