EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 43Empowering Platform Teams

In the previous chapter, I introduced the two main types of product teams and described how platform teams create leverage and encapsulate complexity for experience teams.

Platform teams raise the level of empowerment for other teams by abstracting away the underlying complexity of the services and the architecture.

The topic of empowerment for platform teams is always a little tricky. That's because, while the purpose of an experience team is to solve problems for users and customers, the purpose of a platform team is really to enable the experience teams to better solve problems for their customers. So, the contribution of a platform team is indirect.

To understand how this impacts platform teams, it helps to separate the two types of work that all product teams—platform and experience teams alike—must do.

On the one hand, they are moving the purpose of their team forward. That's their main work, and we'll come back to that in a minute.

However, every product team also has some amount of what we call “keep‐the‐lights‐on” obligations.¹

This is the daily work necessary to keep the business running. Things like fixing critical bugs, addressing performance issues, and adding critical capabilities for nonnegotiable things that come up, such as compliance issues.

It is true that platform teams tend to have more of these keep‐the‐lights‐on items than the average experience team, and that's because of the nature of the work involved in enabling ...