Confessions of a platform team

In this talk, we will discuss the role of a platform team in a professional services company supporting DevOps culture. Why a platform team? Because not all heroes wear capes. Why a professional services company? Because most of the talks are from product-oriented companies’ POV and the world is in demand for talks from a service perspective.For quite some time now, we understand that major human accomplishments are achieved as a team effort. But not all teams are made the same. While we understand that cross-functional feature teams are superior in delivering customer value, organizations fostering DevOps culture desperately rely on another type of a team – a platform team.The purpose of a platform team is to provide underlying internal services and thus relieve feature teams from implementing them on their own. By leveraging ready-made services, feature teams can better focus on building customer-facing functionalities while enjoying premium Developer eXperience.Drawing from our 5-year experience in building a platform team in a professional services company, we will share our journey, experiments that taught us a lot, and wins that called for a beer. We will also map our experiences, both bitter ones and the sweet, to the ideas recently published in a book Team Topologies.