I’m working on a talk about rewriting platforms for LDX3 later this month. Spoiler alert: a lot of the talk centers around why rewriting platforms is usually a very bad idea. For more on that you can read the rearchitecting platforms chapter of my latest book.
One of the points we make in the book is that, generally speaking, platform teams are not the foci of innovation at companies. Platform innovations often come either by adopting external innovations, or absorbing and expanding platform-like work that was created by internal application engineering teams for their own purposes. I won’t say that it’s impossible for platform teams to innovate, but a lot of the innovation is much more incremental and evolutionary rather than novel and revolutionary.
But this doesn’t mean that there’s no need for strategy in your platform team; on the contrary, platform teams are often the fulcrum that drives important architectural evolution across companies. Pretty much every major change in technology that I have lived through has needed platform-level support: containerization, microservices, event-driven systems, big data, continuous delivery, observability, the cloud, elastic scaling. Many build on one another through the platform, such as containerization making it easier to move to the cloud and moving to the cloud making elastic scaling more realistic.
This is what strategy starts to look like as a platform leader. You’re watching where the state of the art is going, and thinking about what makes sense to introduce or evolve so that you can take advantage of that over time. You’re not forcing everyone to move from bare metal hardware to kubernetes overnight, but you’re making the tools to support bare metal to virtualization/containers available, easy to use, and cost-effective, to encourage the natural evolution to happen. The larger the company, the longer these timelines will run, and the more that you’re going to have a number of leading and lagging strategies running, but this is the engine of baseline modernization that needs constant feeding to keep your technology stack from stagnating.
“Strategy” and “Vision” are so often conflated in peoples’ minds that this kind of boring but reliable forward progress is overlooked as strategic. But when leaders can execute in this way over years, the application/product teams have that much more flexibility and power to innovate and do interesting things without having to completely go out on their own. So, platform leaders, don’t feel bad if you’re not at the forefront of innovation! You don’t have to drive the next innovation to be strategic, you just need to make it easy for others to get there.
Enjoy this post? You might like my books: The Manager’s Path, and Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders, available on Amazon and Safari Online.
