Candost is a software engineering leader, writer, coach, mentor, and advisor.

He works towards creating great and high-performing systems and teams whose members work in sync, have good communication, share common principles, and are aligned on the same goal. He always wants to create and be part of a powerful and strongly communicating team working toward a clear vision that he can contribute and be passionate about.

L8 Conf talks

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, up-skilling engineers, 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 the challenges we faced in a dynamic and changing organization, the mistakes we have made, and how we solved the bottleneck situation.

In the end, you'll have ideas about how to work with a non-bottleneck platform team and what kind of mental model, leadership, and skills it requires.