The Art of Platform Development
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This document discusses developing platforms by taking a capabilities perspective rather than a product perspective. It argues that viewing development through the lenses of business, capabilities, and people allows for synergies across products and more optimal allocation of work. By consolidating demands and expertise into shared backlogs and allowing cross-team collaboration, multiple teams can work together to build reusable capabilities that emerge into a platform. This approach helps overcome organizational barriers to platform development imposed by traditional product-aligned structures.
The Art of Platform Development
- 1. The Art of Platform Development Brian O’Neill Lead Architect, Health Market Science @boneill42, bone@alumni.brown.edu
- 2. What’s the goal? Make our products look like they were built by one team. Change “product development” into an exercise of capabilities composition.
- 3. Platform Development • Requires a composition of perspectives: • Business Perspective • Capabilities Perspective • People Perspective
- 4. The Business Perspective ID Desire Opport Cost unity 1 Make a google-like service to search all tweets ever $3M $500K for specific words. 2 Make it possible to search for tweeters geospatially. $1.5 $250K 3 Enable tweeting via voice recognition. $2M $750K 4 Enable voice navigation of tweets. $1M $800K 5 Make it possible for to perform faceted search on $5M $500K tweets (by age, gender, etc.)
- 5. Why do we need more? This perspective estimates costs in isolation. BUT! Items may overlap functionally, making subsequent epics cheaper. • If you truly plan to do all, reality might be… ID Desire Opportunity Cost 1 Make a google-like service to search all $3M $500K tweets ever for specific words. 2 Make it possible to search for tweeters $1.5 $50K (-$200K) geospatially. 5 Make it possible for to perform faceted $5M $50K (-$450K) search on tweets (by age, gender, etc.)
- 6. The Capabilities Perspective Desire Supports Cost (points) Business Objective Create real-time index of all tweets. (1), (2), (5) 13 Add geospatial information to the index. (2) 5 Add gender and age to the index. (5) 5 Enable voice recognition interface. (3), (4) 20 Capture tweets via voice recognition. (3) 13 Capture voice commands to navigate tweets. (4) 5
- 7. Planning The capabilities perspective allows us to recognize synergies. It also decouples the development from the specific use. (which encourages a platform perspective)
- 8. Initial state Independent product backlogs with an 1:1 between backlog and team Product 1 Product 1 Product 2 Product 2 Product 3 Product 3 Product 4 Product 4 Team 1 Team 1 Team 2 Team 2 Team 3 Team 3 Team 4 Team 4
- 9. The Challenges Platform perspective must be imposed upon the teams since it is absent from the artifacts. We locally optimize within each silo, instead of optimizing effort based on demand for capabilities. To deliver a platform, we need to swim upstream against Conway’s Law.
- 10. A potential change… Consolidated into a capabilities backlog, 1:n between backlog and team. Business Demand Business Demand Red Red Blue Blue Green Green Yellow Yellow Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team
- 11. Team Dynamics Leverage an “open-source” approach to platform development. Any team can work on anything. Any team can contribute to any platform component. Github helps here: “gating” commits via pull requests Red Red Blue Blue Green Green Yellow Yellow Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Pull Requests! The “Platform The “Platform
- 12. The People Perspective Ideally, any team would be able to tackle any story and implement front-to-back, but… All teams are not created equal, expertise differs based on team composition.
- 13. e.g. Business Demand Business Demand Red Red Blue Blue Green Green Yellow Yellow Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team html5 1 html5 10 html5 5 html5 3 C* 5 C* 1 C* 10 C* 2 SOLR 9 SOLR 1 SOLR 3 SOLR 3 Consolidating demand allows us to give the right work to the right team based on expertise, not product line.
- 14. The People Perspective We can quantify demand for expertise in the backlog. Desire Supports Cost Skill Set Business (points) Required Objective Create real-time index of all tweets. (1), (2), (5) 13 SOLR Add geospatial information to the index. (2) 5 SOLR Add gender and age to the index. (5) 5 SOLR Enable voice recognition interface. (3), (4) 20 HTML5 Capture tweets via voice recognition. (3) 13 HTML5 Capture voice commands to navigate (4) 5 HTML5 tweets.
- 15. Enables better planning… Business demand for expertise will change over time.
- 16. Enables conversations like… • “Maybe we should give story X to the team M to ramp them on technology P, because we have a lot of the work coming.” Or… • “Since we don’t have much need for technology Z, let’s just re-sequence the work as not to hit the learning curve on more than one team.”
- 17. Controlling the Chaos: Accountability Business Demand Business Demand Red Red Blue Blue Green Green Yellow Yellow Team Team Team Team Team Team Team Team html5 1 html5 10 html5 5 html5 3 C* 5 C* 1 C* 10 C* 2 SOLR 9 SOLR 1 SOLR 3 SOLR 3 Product Product Product Product Product Product Product Product Accountability Accountability 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 Like expertise, accountability differentiates the teams. But it does NOT define them. (or what they work on)
- 18. The Product Definition Forum http://www.slideshare.net/dhaval.r.panchal/keeping-product-backlog-healthy
- 19. The Agile Platform Recipe Take your business demand. Pivot the demand to focus on capabilities. Add in the requisite expertise. Sequence the work to optimize for productivity and value. Sit back and watch the platform emerge.
- 20. Advanced Topics