In a world where 80% of software engineering organizations are moving towards building platform teams1, the question isn’t whether you should adopt platform engineering, but how. Puppet’s 2023 State of DevOps Report highlights that 94% of businesses reported substantial benefits from platform engineering2, so the trajectory is quite clear. The time to adopt platform engineering is now.
For leaders in larger enterprises or mid-size organizations, whether in fintech, health tech, insurance tech, telecommunication, or any other field where digitalization is on the rise, the path to success is adopting platform engineering quickly and cost-effectively. This guide will provide 7 practical steps for tech and business leaders to spearhead the transformative journey of adopting platform engineering in your organization. By sharing our industry insights and experience, we hope to help you navigate and harness the potential of platform engineering and a top-performing platform team.
7 Steps to Start and Adopt Platform Engineering
1. Define Goals and Purposes
To lay a solid foundation for a successful platform engineering team, start by establishing clear and actionable goals. This goes beyond identifying what you want to accomplish; it is about understanding why these goals are critical to your organization’s success. A few key questions to consider when defining your platform visions:
- What are the core objectives of this platform?
- Will it speed up application delivery? Or improve consistency of deployment?
- Is it affordable? Does it align with your organization’s financial plan?
- How will platform engineering add tangible value to your business?
These goals must address both your organization’s current needs and its long-term aspirations. Remember who you are serving when setting these goals – your platform users’ satisfaction should be a priority. By satisfying their needs and creating a platform that is easy to use, you can guarantee a successful transition and an overall performance advancement post-implementation.
2. Assess Needs and Current Landscape
Dive deep into the biggest challenges your organization is facing. Are you struggling to find and keep DevOps talents and suffering from high turnover? Are you facing performance inefficiencies in your DevOps processes? Or are you in need of a more cost-effective solution to maintain or even scale up your DevOps operation?
Before adopting platform engineering practice or establishing a platform team, many clients suffered from chaotic workflows, tool explosion, and significant cognitive load that led to developer burnout. Their DevOps teams were constantly “busy” with daily maintenance (think manual troubleshooting or YAML engineering), but they never had the bandwidth to focus on high-level, innovative and strategic thinking that could unlock more business opportunities.
With a comprehensive assessment of your team’s needs and your existing technological and operational capacity, you can pinpoint areas ripe for improvement and innovation, allowing you to tailor your platform engineering strategy to effectively address these gaps. This will ensure that your platform engineering efforts are realistic and poised for success.
3. Identify Roles and Allocate Resources to Hire
A platform team involves a mix of diverse roles, including product line managers, product managers, module owners, team leads, developers, QA and DevOps talents.
If you are currently leading a medium to large DevOps team with little platform engineering experience, you may be facing a dilemma: should I extensively hire experienced platform engineering talents or assign some senior DevOps staff to explore platform engineering alongside their usual responsibilities?
The former option comes with an astronomical cost. According to Glassdoor and Jobstreet, the average salary for Platform Engineer is HKD771,785/USD98,676 p.a. in Hong Kong, SGD 155,688/USD116,839 p.a. in Singapore, MYR 156,000/USD33,585 p.a. in Malaysia, and Rp 259,764,000/USD10,274 p.a. in Indonesia. While the latter may seem like a cost-saving option, reassigning experienced DevOps staff might risk the quality of your ongoing application delivery. Besides, becoming a platform engineering expert takes months, if not years.
This is probably one of the most challenging steps for tech and business leaders, as you would need to strike a balance between financial feasibility and the need for high-quality resources. You can consider opting for a hybrid solution (a smaller platform team + a smarter, more reliable platform engineering tool) to make platform engineering adoption an attainable reality.
4. Develop a Product Roadmap
Adopting platform engineering starts with a shift to a product mindset, and your roadmap is the foundation. Start by creating a well-defined product roadmap; it is the blueprint for your platform engineering journey. Outline the key milestones, technology adoption phases, and integration points with existing systems. With a clear roadmap, every team member will understand their roles and their common goal. Regularly revisit and update this roadmap to respond to market changes or business priorities to stay on course.
5. Decision: Build or Buy
Do you want to build a platform from scratch with specific features or buy a ready-to-use, out-of-the-box platform engineering tool that can be customized? Here are some pros and cons of each option:
Building a platform from scratch:
- Pros: high customization, solid control and easy integration
- Cons: time-consuming, high cost, resource-intensive, hard to scale
Buying a platform engineering tool
- Pros: Faster implementation, cost-effective, comes with vendor support and regular updates, extremely easy to scale.
- Cons: not ideal for small tech teams or infrequent deployment needs, fewer customization options.
Before making a decision, you should weigh the pros and cons and reconsider your business needs. At the early stages of platform engineering adoption, choosing a platform engineering tool and its service enables you to leverage the expertise of existing industry leaders for trends, insights and technological advice, which may be helpful to jump-start your transformation.
Choose a platform engineering tool provider offering customization options, “everything as codes” practice, self-service, and on-demand environments for the most effortless onboarding. But more importantly, look for a tool created by industry leaders. They truly understand the daily nuances and are driven by a mission to make platform engineering accessible to all. The commitment to evolving and growing with their client’s needs will be invaluable in the long run.
6. Implementation
Here is where your planning comes to life! Technological implementation is straightforward: set up the foundational elements of your platform, focus on critical areas in your roadmaps, ensure seamless integration with existing systems, etc. Operational and organizational implementation, on the other hand, require leadership effort. During this phase, foster transparent communication across the platform, DevOps and business teams. Encourage feedback and continuous improvement and learning – they are the cornerstones of the platform engineering and DevOps philosophies. Schedule regular progress reviews and team meetings to help keep the project on track and aligned with your goals and timeline.
7. Measure and Adjust
Once your platform is operational, the focus can be shifted to measuring its performance and impact. Define key metrics or KPIs to monitor and measure efficiency, error rates, user satisfaction, etc. In addition to measuring the platform’s performance, utilize DORA Metrics to provide insight into your DevOps performance. With data-driven insight, you can refine your strategy to align with your DevOps and business targets. Be ready to make adjustments as continuous measurement helps fine-tune the platform and identify new areas for growth and opportunities. Cultivate a culture of feedback within your platform team and the organization, so you can drive innovation and ensure your platform and the platform team remain relevant and effective when faced with ever-evolving technology and changing market demands.
Final Step Before Implementing Platform Engineering
Platform engineering and platform teams are crucial for scaling up high-growth companies. Are your DevOps needs growing, but you struggle with hiring, retaining and onboarding experienced DevOps and platform engineering talents? Do you want to improve your DevOps reliability and consistency and need standardization of workflows to fulfill advanced business expectations? Are you searching for a smart and cost-effective way to scale up your DevOps operation without an astronomical investment?
If your answer is yes, you need an enterprise-level DevOps Tool to accelerate DevOps workflow and deliver applications faster, safer and with high scalability. Deploy is a continuous deployment automation tool that helps every enterprise application team cut down deployment time by half, with 100% in-house control of the CI/CD pipeline.
Get in touch now with RE:FORM now and discover how we can help you get more done quicker, with better governance, fuller control and a smaller cognitive load.
