LinkedIn Post

How I create a winning Platform Engineering team: | Justin Nearing

How I create a winning Platform Engineering team: I start with the pillars of our team, the anchor for our role in the organization. For me, Platform Eng is defined by three pillars: Performance & Reliability, Security, Developer Experience. I look to create incentives for our team to deeply care about each pillar. As an example, I don't want my teams incentives to be "shuffle tickets out of my bucket and onto someone else's." I would rather devs ignore their tickets if it meant measurable improvements on one or more of those pillars. And I do mean measurable. Being data-driven is critical for a platform team. Metrics for all the services being managed, instrumented with well-tuned alerts is table-stakes. Beyond that, adding usage metrics for things like "dev environment spin-up time" gives your team a graph. Graphs you can see need improving. In fact, I have a rule that every feature we work on should have metrics added or improved on. Finally, I think of Platform as a Product. It's not a couple CI/CD pipelines, some alerting tools, or a bunch of containers in the cloud. It's a product your org pays a lot of money for. I want our team to think about the cohesive whole, I want us to be incentivized to be relentlessly customer focused- our customers being the developers who use our platform. This approach has proven to be incredibly effective at measurably improving developer velocity, reducing production incidents, and keeping our team focused on working on the most important things. And it all stems from having a winning strategy for your Platform Engineering team. #platformengineering #platform #devops #cloud #infrastructure #engineeringmanager #techlead #leadership

www.linkedin.com