Between cryptic code commits and strategic server outages, it can sometimes feel like your platform team is out to get you. But their actions aren’t part of some grand plan devised to sow chaos. If requests are mysteriously vanishing into the digital abyss, it doesn’t mean your platform team hates you. It just means there’s a communication gap that needs bridging.
We’re here to help you unravel all those sinister-seeming motives and help you understand what’s really going on with your platform team. Doing so will mean you can work together to achieve greater efficiency and productivity, turning common complaints and challenges into opportunities for improvement. After all, platform teams now play a crucial role in enabling product development and maintaining underlying infrastructure.
1. Platform team time pressures
Is your platform team slow to respond? If so, it’s not a deliberate attempt to subvert your team’s progress. Most commonly, slow responsiveness is due to resource constraints, a lack of prioritisation or a complex decision-making process. Platform teams have rapidly developed more value for enterprises, meaning that processes and systems are often playing catch-up. This can lead to longer-than-ideal response times.
Clear communication can help address this. If you understand your platform team’s bottlenecks, you’ll be in a better position to ensure you don’t add to them. Likewise, if the platform team understands your key priorities – as well as less urgent areas – they’ll be better placed to ensure you receive faster responses in areas where it really counts. Working together to implement a service level agreement (SLA) could help clarify expectations and commitments on both sides.
2. Computer says no!
It can feel at times as though inflexible and rigid processes have blown up your roadmap, with “stability” used as an excuse to thwart innovation and progress. Obviously, this is not the case. If the business suffers from reduced innovation, every team suffers along with it – including the platform team. So, it’s hardly in their interest to slow things down.
This is where shifting to agile practices can help, and something for teams to pull together on to ensure that everyone benefits. Establishing feedback loops between product and platform teams is a great help with this, as well as with other areas of work.
3. False flags and inaccurate documentation
Spending countless weeks trying to integrate and progress, only to find the platform team gave you inaccurate documentation and sent you down the wrong road – albeit inadvertently – can be immensely frustrating. Investing in an API management platform that enables you to create exceptional API experiences can help. You can use it to ensure simple, comprehensive and up-to-date documentation for platform services and APIs, making it easy for all teams to understand and use.
4. Unpredictable outages
When platform services experience frequent or unpredictable outages, this can disrupt product development and customer experiences enormously. Platform stability is crucial for the entire organisation.
Implementing robust monitoring and alerting systems ensures this doesn’t happen. Doing so can identify issues proactively, enabling your platform team to resolve them before they lead to outages. Well-defined incident response procedures go hand-in-hand with this, enabling your platform team to minimise downtime and improve post-incident analysis. All of which feed into the delivery of the stable platform on which your team relies.
5. Limited self-service
Constantly needing your platform team’s assistance isn’t fun for anyone. It interrupts both teams’ workflows and reduces productivity on both sides. If your platform’s self-service capabilities are limited, open up channels of communication with your platform team and look at where you can reduce dependencies to benefit all concerned.
Creating self-service portals or tools that allow product teams to provide resources and access platform services independently can reduce bottlenecks, delays and frustrations for everyone. But you won’t get there without a consultative approach to the platform and what your team needs from it in terms of self-service.
There could even be some quick wins here. Something as simple as enhancing documentation with step-by-step guides for everyday tasks could enable product teams to help themselves to a far greater degree.
6. Over-engineering
Overly complex and feature-rich platforms can be challenging to use and maintain. If your platform team seems more interested in building elaborate systems than meeting the business’ specific needs, it might be time to take a step back and remind everyone of the platform’s purpose. Being clear with the team on what you need from the platform – and why – can help to guide things back towards simplicity.
As you can see from the above, there’s no big conspiracy where your platform team is trying to sabotage your productivity. They’re just dealing with the everyday pressures and realities of life in a fast-changing technological landscape, as is your own team. Working together towards agreed platform goals, with feedback loops well and truly open, should help you all boost platform engineering efficiency together.
