Advocating for a Product Mindset within Platform Teams and How We Do It at HelloTech (Part 1)
Having mastered Product Management in their end products and realised the benefit of improving the customer experience, more companies are shifting their attention to how they can apply the same techniques to the rest of their organisation.
In their latest Technology Radar, ThoughtWorks rated “Platform Product Management” among the most influential trends in the technology sector. As companies and their development teams grow, Platform engineering becomes more important in delivering new digital tools to support those teams; yet managing this delivery becomes more complex. Platform product management focuses the work of Platform engineering to offer “…teams self-service access to the business APIs, tools, knowledge and support necessary to build and operate their own solutions” (ThoughtWorks).
HelloTech is on the cutting edge of transitioning Platform teams to this new way of working with the goal of improving the entire developer experience from ideation to deployment. We recognised a Platform team needed a product lead. Eventually this grew to hiring more PO’s to manage different parts of the Platform organisation, hence why I was hired!
In part one, I will cover:
- What is Wrong with Traditional Platform Teams Without Product Representation
- The Benefits of Adopting a Product First Mindset for Platform at HelloTech
- Best Practices from HelloTech for Adopting a Product Platform Mentality
In part two I will cover:
- How to Measure Success for Every Launch
- How to Measure Platform Success Within your Organisation
- Case Study: Platform Products at HelloTech: HF Toolbox and HF Inspector
What is Wrong with Traditional Platform Teams Without Product Representation
The most important part of any Platform product is that it is built for developers. To be clear, the current problem is not that engineers make bad Platform products. The problem lies in roles and responsibilities for a productising Platform not being set up for success in the same way as customer products.
Platform teams have grown in size and importance, yet processes have not kept up, i.e. Platform engineers are working in silos. Inefficiency in the form of duplicate effort reduces developer capacity and increases the need for short-term work on maintenance. With Platform engineers too occupied with what is immediately in front of them, no one is spending the time looking at long-term problems with the developer experience as a whole. As a result, developers do not feel their concerns and suggestions are being taken seriously.
Simply adding more Platform engineers to an inefficient process is clearly not as leveraged as fixing the root case: an inefficient product process and lack of developer autonomy. Establishing more empathy with developers and their experience and creating simple solutions to enable teams to be more autonomous is the best long-term solution.
The Benefits of Adopting a Product First Mindset for Platform in HelloTech
We sought out to improve the developer experience in HelloTech by having more empathy toward their problems. This has already had ripple effects within the organisation.
Developer efficiency improves
Empathy means building the tools our HelloTech developers want and in a format they can readily use and apply. Highly intuitive Platform tools can go so far as to make our developers autonomous, able to operate products without needing in-depth knowledge of every step of their deployment process: code, run tests, CI/CD, etc. This means greater developer productivity and less Platform engineering time spent answering developer questions.
Our hiring costs go down
Happier developers are a competitive advantage. By adhering to the mindset that our development organisation is as important to HelloFresh as our customers, retention and the ability to hire becomes easier. According to DevOps Zone’s 2020 survey: “Happy developers are nearly twice as likely to: say they like their job (1.5x more likely), get work done (1.3x more likely), encourage friends to come work with them (1.6x more likely)”
More efficient spending on internal tools
Some Platform teams treat finishing a project as the key result, never validating the core assumption that a new tool is helpful for developers. By doing so early in the process, HelloTech can save money on tools that go un- or under-used.
Better Platform team experience
By delegating tasks such as stakeholder communication, launch activities, documentation and user research, backend engineers, our Platform engineering can focus more time on building. In several retrospectives with squads, this has been a point of contention before a PO joined their team. The happiness of each Platform squad has improved due to adding product representation.
Best Practices from HelloTech for Adopting a Product Platform Mentality
Some of the key changes we made at HelloTech to encourage this product mindset have one theme throughout: continuously put the “customer” (development teams) first by establishing processes that establish greater empathy.
Discovering the problems
Today, Platform teams tend to prioritise work based on a set of criteria familiar to Platform engineering, which is not necessarily the best for the wider developer organisation within a company. That’s why at HelloTech, we widen the scope of discovering problems across the entire organisation and prioritising which to solve based on a more nuanced set of criteria catered specifically to the organisation’s goals.
We talk to our development teams and identify common threads of confusion or conversation. For example, we send out a ‘Developer Happiness Survey’ to ask our teams how well we at Platform are doing our jobs. We want to find out if they have the right tools to be productive when developing, if they are comfortable with our infrastructure, and if they feel like they know enough about what Platform teams are there for. Surveys are a mechanism we use to avoid the common pitfall of paying too much attention to outlier perspectives generated by more vocal developers.
We are also in the process of building a customer empathy map at HelloFresh to understand our developers’ key frustrations and pain points. We are following UX Knowledge Base’s suggested format, which has a number of resources available for Product Managers. The goal of this exercise is to empathise and communicate the problems clearly to everyone on the team so we are all on the same page.
Validate your solutions
HelloTech’s Platform team does an awesome job looking out for third party solutions to solve key development problems. As a PO, I can take a step further by validating solutions alongside our HelloTech organisation, which ensures we are choosing the solution that best fits the organisation’s needs. We involve development teams in the evaluation process, asking questions around what they struggle with today and how it can be improved with something else. This will help establish the right set of criteria to evaluate a third party tool.
For an in-house solution, we always build alongside development. At HelloTech, we do this by creating an MVP and validating it quickly by sharing it with our dev teams. We run usability tests by asking them to perform key tasks and observing their behaviour. Iterating quickly is a distinct benefit of Platform Product Management over customer facing products because it is much faster to validate with users who are in the same building.
Launch for excitement
Before, Platform announcements could seem either disruptive or unexciting to the rest of the organisation, resulting in important announcements going ignored or a slower adoption of the tools we build. We recognised this as an opportunity to introduce product thinking to all of our launches.
We use branding as a mechanism to make tools memorable
HelloTech’s Engineering Experience squad brands all of the tools launched. We print stickers, place them on our laptops, and create emojis in Slack to reinforce the tool’s brand. An excellent example of this is ‘Ahoy!’, which is an internally developed tool to create isolated development/testing environments.
The Ahoy! branding was memorable at first glance and after repeated use; throughout the tool and documentation are odes to the sailing motif. Ahoy! is now the company standard for all testing due to its high brand recognition.
We make announcements stand out
Email and slack are crowded and so we try to make our announcements short, clear and memorable. Adding a silly gif, bonus challenge, or emoji to share is enough to grab a users’ attention and encourage action. We keep announcements very focused and for additional information point people to a README or documentation page. See example of such announcement below.
In addition to meaningful launch messages and branding, we supplement with a healthy combination of training, workshops and documentation. We hope this encourages self-servicing and allows for Platform engineers to focus on work rather than answering questions.
Conclusion
In summary, as Platform teams continue to gain popularity, product representation is an important part of the organisational equation. At HelloFresh, we have seen this shift and started to apply product management techniques to the discovery of problems, validation of solutions, and launching of a product internally. Look out for Part 2, where I will talk about how to measure success for every launch and for Platform success within an organisation. Additionally, I will talk through two HelloTech Platform products from ideation to launch.
