Hey!

Every once in a while, I’ll find a resource that’s too good not to share with the community. This series by Doma’s Michael Galloway is definitely one of those.

Let’s get bakin’ 🥐

Finding your platform org’s vision

So your platform org has nailed down a killer mission statement. You have your why. The next step is defining your vision, or the what. Here are 5 steps to figuring that out, courtesy of this article from Michael Galloway.

1. Nail down what you need to achieve. Aka. What matters most to your stakeholders? Do your research to figure out how your platform org’s efforts can best align with the goals of the business. Then confirm your findings with relevant stakeholders: leadership, product management, engineering, etc.
2. Leverage your purpose. 💪 There are many different ways to approach the challenges your platform org was created to solve. Your mission statement provides the best lens to understand those challenges and how your team should address them.
3. Leverage user research. Look through your interviews with developers to understand how your current setup is working (or not working) for your users. Combine this qualitative information with the data gathered from the tools and services the customers currently use to piece together a high-level journey. Then dive into the details to figure out the problems that are holding your setup back. You’re looking for the metaphorical pebbles in your shoes – the problems that impede your ability to run fast.
4. Define your vision. 👀 Now that you know what you’re working with, you can define how you’re going to make the workflows better for your developers. Think of your vision like a story. A great vision is a simple story with characters your customers relate to and with a problem your customers recognize.
5. More feedback. Don’t forget to check in with your users to see if the changes you want to implement resonates with our customers. 😉

Looking for more concrete examples? Be sure to check out the full article, where Michael walks through what this process looked like at Doma.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 When it comes to Platform Engineering, SRE and DevOps, the debate is alive and well. Here is an interesting point of view: Is Platform Engineering is putting an end to DevOps and SRE?

🥐 Have your heard of "open source minimalism"? This article from Mike Melanson says that "problems arise when there is a mismatch between the complexity of the problem and that of the solution".

🥐 Podcast time. 🎙️ Tune in to Ship It! podcast episode about Developer Experience Infrastructure (DXI) to get to know what that means, and how to improve it.

🥐 How many people can relate?👇

🥐 Have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. One community member did this amazing list of blogs that every SRE/DevOps/Platform Engineer enthusiasts should follow. You're welcome 😉

This newsletter is a community effort, so if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way. You can share your ideas here.

Cya next week!

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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