SPEAKERS

Session Name: The Legend of Pretend Platform Teams

Platform teams are becoming an increasingly popular and effective way of allowing software development teams to save time and deliver stuff faster. But what happens when your platform team isn’t achieving this purpose? After working across a range of organisations, I’ve seen a lot of time, money and awesome engineering skills wasted in platform teams over the years. This isn’t because platform teams are a waste in themselves! I love customer-focused, platform teams who create great platforms for software development teams. It’s because platform teams, due to a number of reasons, are often not set-up or run in a way that ensures their work directly contributes to the goals of the platform team. In this session I’ll take you through some of the problems these platform teams make, and the impacts this has on the team and the broader organisation. We will then discuss some simple ideas to help combat these problems, and how to refocus platform teams on helping software development teams to save time and deliver stuff faster. This talk is rated level 100-200 with a target audience of anyone who works with or on platform teams. This talk will mainly focus on ways of working within platform teams, but will use examples based around the typical offerings from platform teams (container platforms, CI/CD tools, observability tools etc.)

Speaker Bio:

Kirsty brings a love of learning and continuous improvement into every team she works with, as well as a drive to see individuals within those teams flourish. With a decade-long journey in the technology sector, she has learned there is never a shortage of opportunities for people who love to solve tricky problems. Her core expertise resides in platform and cloud engineering, where she engineers resilient, reliable platforms in cloud environments. Kirsty believes a well-rounded skill set is the key maker of a great technologist, having worked in many roles: tech strategy, iteration manager, quality analyst, business analyst and most recently for a couple of years as a software developer.