Build your team structure

  • Article

At a conceptual level, platform engineers are the glue between development and operations. As the people building your internal developer platform, platform engineers are developers with product mindset that also understand operations. Whether they started out as developers or on the operations team is less important than skill set. A team building an internal developer platform can gain strength from bringing in various team members with different backgrounds: development, IT operations, K8s admins, site reliability engineers (SRE), infrastructure as code (IaC) experts, etc.

For example, the whole idea here is to think about development teams as your customer, and many operations, SRE, and DevOps teams already build and deliver capabilities or tools with this goal in mind today. In fact, the CLIs and other tools these teams provide to developers are often the first deliverables on a journey towards platform engineering.

You can also strengthen your team’s knowledge and skill set for developing tools by bringing well-suited developers from existing application teams in your organization. These developers are in a good place help represent the voice of the customer as you think about your investments.

In terms of specific organization structure, the Team Topologies model (which is an evolution of the equally useful DevOps Topologies model) is a good approach to think about what you need to do. For example, you might opt to have an evolved platform team, with separate specialists that are more focused on the developer facing aspects of your platform. We won't go into these specifics here given the wealth of existing information on the topic.

Regardless, this team focuses on building an internal developer platform as an internal product where developers are the primary target customer. To be successful, you should also identify:

  • Sponsors for the team (typically executives) who help with prioritizing high-level goals and championing the platform's use across the wider organization.
  • Stakeholders from operations, security, compliance, and architecture to help ensure that the platform can accommodate their guidance and needs.
  • Someone to act as the product manager (regardless of actual title) to understand and help prioritize needs from all constituents.

Define the problem space