A case against central platform teams

Build a platform organization rather than a platform team

This article was originally published on my blog — https://kislayverma.com/organizations/a-case-against-platform-teams/

Most technology companies above a certain size start thinking about creating an internal platform team to build/manage systems that are used by multiple teams/products. This is a very high leverage team since they can beneficially impact many products at once and super-charge the organization. However, today I want to put some things that do not work well with internal platform teams, at least in the versions that I have encountered.

Tl;dr — It is better to operate multiple platform teams specializing in their own techno-business domains than to operate a single platform team. Platform Thinking is not about reuse, it is about facilitating evolution, and fixating on reuse destroys that opportunity. Instil platform thinking in all teams and allow self-reliant domains and platforms to emerge organically instead of forcing the issue up front.

What does this team do?

Having a separate platforms team often means that all horizontal concerns start getting pushed to them. Eventually, this team cannot identify its customers and simply ends up supporting many…