Building a Successful Platform: Acceleration, Autonomy & Accountability

Do we build a greenfield platform or do we incrementally centralize common foundations? Do we abstract away all complexity or provide upfront knobs and handles for composability? Do we invest in building new platform features, or improve the productivity, engagement and satisfaction of our existing platform users?

Platform engineering is rarely just a technical problem to solve. It involves product, people and process – and various challenges to consider with each, at scale. When done well, a successful platform drives developer productivity, efficiency and rapid business value for any organization. 

In this talk, we’ll cover:

  • When you need a platform and when you don’t

  • Examples of unsuccessful platforms and the three pillars of a successful one – Acceleration, Autonomy & Accountability 

  • How to drive acceleration through early alignment, appropriate coverage and leverage

  • How to build a delightful platform and drive its adoption with a users first mindset 

  • How to bake in unambiguous accountability in terms of ownership; with the right incentives for healthy use of the platform

As early adopters or practitioners, this talk will give you a primer for building successful platforms; anchoring on the objectives you seek, outcomes you desire, and the behaviors you want to incentivize or disincentivize within your engineering organization. 


Speaker

Smruti Patel

VP of Engineering @Apollo Graph

Smruti Patel is the VP of Engineering at Apollo Graph, the leading graphQL platform for building highly performant APIs, at scale, for rapid digital transformation. She has led and scaled high performing engineering teams at Stripe and VMware, building critical infrastructure for global businesses. Her interests include mentoring and coaching, hiking with her boys, and traveling the world.

Read more
Find Smruti Patel at:

Date

Tuesday Oct 3 / 10:35AM PDT ( 50 minutes )

Location

Ballroom A

Topics

Platform Engineering Efficiency Developer Productivity Go-To-Market Acceleration

Slides

Slides are not available

Share

From the same track

Session Platform Engineering

Understanding Platforms: What They Are, Why They Work, When to Use Them, How to Build Them

Tuesday Oct 3 / 11:45AM PDT

Technical concepts are something that are thought of, approached, and understood differently across engineers, managers, and executives. Bridging the gaps and providing understanding to a complex and nuanced topic across all three groups can sometimes feel impossible.

Speaker image - Hazel Weakly

Hazel Weakly

Head of Infrastructure & Developer Experience; Director, Haskell Foundation; Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm

Session Platform Engineering

Building Better Platforms with Empathy: Case Studies and Counter-Examples

Tuesday Oct 3 / 02:45PM PDT

Break out of traditional IT roles with your internal platform. Build a product based on customer empathy and real needs to achieve broad adoption.

Speaker image - David Stenglein

David Stenglein

Solo Consultant @Missing Mass, LLC with Over 28 Years in Systems, Software, and Consulting

Session Platform Engineering

Effective Performance Engineering at Twitter-Scale

Tuesday Oct 3 / 03:55PM PDT

Is performance engineering more craft than machinery? How do you scale something that seems to require both domain-specific context and comprehensive knowledge across multiple levels of the software and hardware stack?

Speaker image - Yao Yue

Yao Yue

Platform Engineer, Distributed System Aficionado, Cache Expert, and the Founder of IOP Systems

Session Platform Engineering

How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap

Tuesday Oct 3 / 05:05PM PDT

Only doing product-led work can lead to an unmaintainable system with lots of downtime. Unfortunately, getting time to work on the things that would prevent that can be challenging.

Speaker image - Ben Hartshorne

Ben Hartshorne

Principal Engineer @Honeycomb, Building Operable Systems with Resilience and Business Value

Session

Unconference: Platform Engineering Done Well

Tuesday Oct 3 / 01:35PM PDT

What is an unconference? An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions.