Focus areas include budget and staffing, scope management, and measuring ROI.
Voluntary
Individual capabilities may exist to provide common foundations for common or critical functionality. These capabilities are built and maintained out of necessity rather than planned and intentionally funded.
These capabilities are built and maintained by people assigned temporarily or voluntarily; no central funding or staffing is intentionally allocated to them. They depend on the current tactical requirements of their users. Decisions are based on incomplete or irrelevant data, leading to misguided priorities.
Leadership primarily reacts to crises rather than proactively driving change, leading to fragmented collaboration and inefficiencies across teams. The focus is on creating awareness of the need for strategic alignment and data-driven decision-making.
Allocating budget and people to maintain common capabilities: Individual developers or teams take responsibility to address urgent technical requirements and capabilities. This isn't always costed - developers take on this work on top of current responsibilities.
Managing scope: Engineers focus on addressing needs within the specific context or scope that the need arose with little sharing of the solution to wider contexts.
Demonstrating return on investment: Measured by how well did the individual or team address the specific issue and the impact on their core project work.
Ad-hoc contributions
As the organization grows, recurring technical challenges such as inconsistent infrastructure provisioning, fragmented security practices, and bottlenecks in deployment pipelines become more apparent. These challenges often result in delays, increased
downtime, and inefficiencies that hinder the overall speed and reliability of software delivery. In response, the organization begins to form dedicated teams tasked with systematically addressing these issues. However, these efforts remain largely reactive, focusing on patching immediate problems rather than proactively preventing them.
The scope of these teams' work is often limited to specific concerns—like improving a particular deployment process or standardizing a subset of security protocols—without a holistic approach to platform-wide improvement.
Leadership begins to address inefficiencies by promoting basic collaboration and introducing metrics, but efforts remain reactive and siloed, with limited empowerment across the organization.
Allocating budget and people to maintain common capabilities: Teams are created to work on key cross cutting concerns, often reactively.
Managing scope: Scope is limited to specific concern.
Demonstrating return on investment: Measure improvements in key cross cutting concerns - size of backlog.
Operationalized with a dedicated team
Budget and people are allocated for persistent people and resource support. The assigned people are tasked with providing a set of
commonly required capabilities to speed up software delivery. Often these teams focus on meeting reactive technical requirements. They may be called DevOps, Engineering Enablement, Developer Experience (DevEx or DevX), Shared Tools, a Centre-Of-Excellence, or even Platform. They’re funded centrally and treated as cost centers.
Platform teams are now recognized as critical to the organization’s success, and there's an effort to measure and justify their contributions. However, the focus may still be on immediate returns rather than long-term growth.
Leadership actively fosters cross-functional teamwork and initial DevOps practices, but struggles with measuring the platform team's value and aligning solutions with user needs, leading to challenges in justifying investments and maintaining efficiency.
Allocating budget and people to maintain common capabilities: Central teams funded based on knowledge of existing technical requirements in order to speed up software delivery.
Managing scope: Scope is broad and shallow. The team creates solutions that try to address the largest common denominator across all teams. The central team focuses on understanding the common needs of all teams and doesn't look for ways to configure or tune solutions to those needs.
Demonstrating return on investment: Measure improvements in speed of delivery.
Scalable as a product
Investment in internal platforms and their capabilities is similar to investment in an enterprise’s outbound products and value streams: based on the value they're expected to provide to their customers. Product management and user experience are explicitly considered and invested in. A chargeback system may be used to reflect platforms’ impact on their customers’ own direct value streams and products. The enterprise allocates funds and staff to the appropriate initiatives by using data-driven performance indicators and feedback loops. Platform teams can ultimately optimize the business itself and contribute to increased profitability.
At this level, we observe a significant cultural shift within the organization, where developers are recognized and treated as valued customers. Leadership emphasizes a culture of empathy and growth, driving a product-led approach and encouraging continuous
improvement, but must ensure these values are deeply embedded in the organization to achieve lasting impact.
Allocating budget and people to maintain common capabilities: Central platform team is staffed and managed like other product teams. Roles include development, product management, design, research, and content. Teams are funded based on roadmap.
Managing scope: Team produces product roadmaps to describe their plans and expected impact on the organization. Platform team
engages with engineering teams to gather requirements, identify new opportunities etc. Engineers are focused on meeting the needs
of all development teams within the organization.
Demonstrating return on investment: Measure and report on improvements in developer satisfaction.
Optimizing with an enabled ecosystem
Platform teams find ways to increase organization-wide efficiency and effectiveness beyond basic capabilities. Core platform maintainers intentionally strive to optimize time-to-market for new products, reduce costs across the enterprise, enable efficient governance and compliance for new services, scale workloads quickly and easily, and other cross-cutting requirements. These core maintainers are focused on enabling capability specialists to seamlessly integrate their requirements and offerings into existing
and new parts of platforms. Further, the organization focuses people and resources from specialist domains like security, performance, quality on engaging with provided platform frameworks to introduce advanced features that can enable product teams to accelerate their adherence to company goals without depending on a centralized team backlog.
Leadership promotes team autonomy and accountability, encouraging innovation while balancing governance, with a focus on maintaining platform relevance and effectiveness in a rapidly changing environment.
Allocating budget and people to maintain common capabilities: Central platform team is staffed and managed like other product teams but more funding is provided to enable contributions across the whole organization. Engineering and non-engineering teams have explicit funding to be able to contribute to platform.
Managing scope: Engineers are focused on enabling platform contributions to allow fast knowledge sharing across the organization.
Demonstrating return on investment: Measure improvements in developer satisfaction.