Platform Engineering

Chapter 11. Your Platforms Are Aligned

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment. When the team is fulfilling its purpose, team members are more effective because they’re more directed.

Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

Alignment is the first criterion for holistically evaluating the success of your platform engineering teams. This requires looking across all the platform teams and asking: are we aligned in what we are doing? Misaligned platform teams create a swamp of a different kind than the “over-general” one we described in Chapter 1. This swamp is filled with overlapping and incompatible products, tricky to use together and often at odds with each other’s goals. It’s just as hard to navigate and can be even more frustrating, as customers struggle with platform teams who can’t see beyond the silos of their own making.

Here are the three areas in which we commonly see misalignments:

Purpose

Platform teams that do not have a holistic mindset (using a product approach to develop software-based abstractions that are foundations for the business and serve a broad customer base) but rather operate with a narrower focus are misaligned in purpose.

Product strategy

Platform teams that operate in silos, building platforms that are good for their specific purpose but needlessly duplicate others or make cross-platform use cases hard, are misaligned on product strategy.

Planning

Platform teams that do not support each other ...