When I started the Platform Stream at Jooble, I hoped to find an article that would provide guidelines and help me navigate the challenges ahead. Unfortunately, such an article didn’t exist at the time. However, I know I’m not the only one on this path – many others are in the same position I was one year ago. I believe that by sharing my experiences and the lessons I've learned, I can help others on their journey in platform engineering. If even one person finds value in this article and can create a successful team more easily, I will be truly happy.

Vision the platform team

Everything starts with vision. It's crucial to create a compelling vision for your platform within the company, not only to inspire the engineers working on it but also to provide a sense of meaning and direction. This vision should clearly articulate where the platform aims to be in the future, enabling the business to thrive. At both Jooble and Paydock, the Platform Vision is designed to complement the product vision, fostering innovation and facilitating rapid value delivery to users.

With this in mind, we have clear expectations for our platform – it must reduce the cognitive load on developers and enable fast-flow software delivery without compromising quality. To achieve this, we provide product teams with the tools they need to focus on creating value for users. This vision not only aligns with solving user problems and providing business value but also gives our platform engineering team a clear purpose and guidance for future development.

From Values to Work

Values are the guiding principles that direct the coordinated efforts of the team, ensuring alignment and fostering individual innovation. At Paydock, we believe in creating a significant impact for both users and the business by being customer-centric, solving real user problems through constant experimentation, all within a collaborative and enjoyable environment.

These values are essential as they shape our work culture and beliefs, driving cohesive and effective collaboration. It's crucial that platform values align with the company’s values and culture to ensure a unified direction. By combining this value-set with our vision, we can clearly see our everyday culture taking shape, providing guidance on ways of working and decision making.

From theory to practice

When building a roadmap for the platform, it's tempting to rely solely on personal experience and intuition. However, this approach risks creating an "ivory tower" scenario, where you might build something no one actually wants or needs. The key to avoiding this pitfall is continuous feedback from end-users and stakeholders, and alignment with business goals.

Let me share an example:

When we defined what to include in the roadmap, we took into consideration two important aspects: business goals and developer feedback. Rather than relying solely on personal experience or intuition, we engaged directly with our users. We didn’t conduct any sophisticated user research initially; instead, we set up simple conversations with engineers and engineering managers.

In our case, we learned through discussions that a major pain point was the release process. Engineers found it slow and complex, leading to infrequent releases and the accumulation of changes. Additionally, we engaged key business stakeholders to align on our current business challenges and priorities, and the answer was clear: “We want to launch more experiments faster.”

Given this knowledge, we set a goal to streamline and accelerate the release process, as it perfectly aligned with business goals and engineers' pain points. By involving engineers and stakeholders, we gathered valuable information and secured buy-in from everyone involved.

As we proceeded, the impact of our work became evident. This approach helped us significantly during development, as engineers were eager to test our improvements and provide feedback and suggestions, leading to better outcomes. By incorporating diverse perspectives and engaging engineers from the start, we developed a solution that resonated with everyone involved. Continuous communication and feedback integration throughout the development process, rather than at the end is key.

Measuring Success

We can't change what we can't measure. In platform development, measuring success is essential. We aimed to significantly improve our release process by automating our pipelines and decreasing build time. By having a clear focus, we successfully reduced our release time by 3x and received positive feedback from engineers with 100% adoption of new pipelines. Quantifying our goals allowed us to measure progress and make data-driven adjustments, ensuring our platform's development proceeded efficiently and effectively.

Conclusion

Building a platform is like orchestrating a symphony. Each part – vision, values, and practical implementation, success metrics – must work together harmoniously to create a seamless performance. Though challenges are many, staying true to our vision and values and integrating them into our daily culture, with constant user engagement, fosters a collaborative environment. This approach not only meets but exceeds expectations. Platform engineering is about the process as much as the final product. The way we work defines the outcome. With each challenge we overcome, we get closer to perfecting our craft. So, let’s keep refining our work, listening to our users, and contributing to the symphony of innovation.