Manuel Pais

Written by Mark Miller | Sep 22, 2023 2:25:30 AM

Session Name: Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms

While we have made great strides in the last decade to break down silos in Engineering, in most organizations when you look outside there is still an abyss of understanding between teams sitting in different divisions in the organization. This can significantly slow down the flow of value to our customers, directly and indirectly. You’ve likely experienced at least one of these in your professional career… Not being allowed to use the right tool for the job because of a strict procurement process. Spending half a day to get a 20€ expense approved and reimbursed. Or a much anticipated employee onboarding portal that ends up being just a UI on top of the 73 steps and 14 approvals required to set up an employee workstation. Turns out traditionally teams and groups are incentivized for outputs, meaning the more cycles they can run and the faster you can close requests the better. So we end up optimizing internal processes... often at the cost of company outcomes. The key here is that every team, every division in an organization can adopt a platform mindset in which they treat what they offer to other teams as an internal product. We have seen this work well inside engineering, and we start to see it in other domains of the business as well: data science & business intelligence, but also leadership, marketing, legal, HR, etc. We will cover some early examples during this talk and think ahead to what the future holds for platforms beyond engineering.

Speaker Bio:

Manuel Pais is an independent IT consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating 􀃖ow. Manuel is co-author of the book "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow" (IT Revolution Press, 2019). He helps organizations rethink their approach to software delivery, operations, and support via training, strategic assessments, practical workshops, and coaching. Also InfoQ lead editor for DevOps. Answers by @manupaisable on Twitter and Medium.