Creating a Platform Community of Practice

Platforms have become the backbone of modern software. From our mobile phones to the automobiles we drive, platforms are everywhere. They provide reusable capabilities that enable customers to build functionality while bringing together producers and consumers. They foster innovation, accelerate time to market, lower costs, and unleash the exchange of new ideas through the ecosystem of producers and consumers. 

But it can be challenging to shift a culture to a platform mindset. That’s where a Community of Practice (CoP) can help. In this article, we will provide an overview of platforms and why they are important in the industry. We will also discuss common challenges associated with moving to a platform mindset and how a Platform CoP can address those challenges along with best practices for getting one started.

In 1967, Melvin Conway introduced the idea of Conway’s law which states, “Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” In other words, if an organization is siloed, the systems built by that organization will be siloed. When systems are built in a siloed manner, that typically results in duplicated capabilities. In most cases, an organization wants to avoid creating duplicate capabilities as it increases the total cost of ownership. There is a distinction between duplicate capabilities vs. similar capabilities but in a different bounded context and doing different things.

As I mentioned in my previous Event Storming article, those are valid scenarios to follow microservices principles to avoid creating a monolith. To follow Conway’s guidance, we should strive to organize around capabilities. Let the capabilities inform the organization’s structure. Platforms provide a foundational set of reusable capabilities. Instead of each application duplicating the same capability, the platform can provide those for all applications and the application teams can focus on building functionality for their specific business use case.

This enables the teams building applications on top of the platform to get their products to market faster. They can leverage the resiliency and security capabilities provided by the platform to configure to their use case. Additionally, it unlocks future ideas from the collaboration the platform ecosystem enables by bringing together producers and consumers. From an organizational perspective, the platform team can organize around the foundational platform capabilities and the application teams building on the platform (i.e., producers) can organize around the capabilities they are building on the platform.

Moving an organization to a platform mindset can be challenging. An organization that is subjected to Conway’s law that is also over-indexed on speed without a reuse strategy will result in capability duplicity. Moving to a culture of reuse requires exploration, collaboration and contribution/extension. It also requires giving up control and building trust in the capabilities that the platform is providing.

Reuse of capabilities requires investment in seeing the forest of the trees — the macro view of an organization’s capabilities and connecting the dots. Next, let’s discuss how a CoP can move the needle on changing the culture to a platform mindset.

A CoP is an organized group of people with a common interest who meet regularly to learn from each other by sharing ideas, experiences, and best practices. William Turner is quoted as saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” which means that beings of similar type, interest, personality, character, or other distinctive attributes tend to mutually associate. This is more or less the same as a CoP. 

Often they start casually and as interest grows and the potential is realized, they become formalized. When starting a Platform CoP, it helps to recruit members with these motivations:

This tends to be the primary characteristic that keeps a CoP active, interesting, and productive. Members who are passionate about a topic will have high engagement and curiosity, debate topics, and want to share knowledge.

Platforms introduce several challenges that need to be solved in the right way to ensure proper security and resiliency across tenants. Members that bring the problems to the CoP help contribute to the backlog of work that the CoP can focus on.

Reusing an existing solution for a platform problem avoids capability duplication and reinventing the wheel. Having CoP members with previous platform experience adds tremendous value as they can share existing patterns and define new ones.

Together, the members of a Platform CoP establish best practices that can be shared with the larger organization. As a result, they become force multipliers that lead their respective areas through the platform mindset change curve. The members also identify the opportunities that can influence the organization’s overall objectives and priorities. A Platform CoP brings together people to collaborate on platform topics. 

It is a safe place where topics can be debated and where ideas can flow. Some of those ideas can include opportunities for inner sourcing and extending existing platforms. All of this helps shift to a platform mindset and accelerates achieving the benefits of platforms across your organization. Next, let’s elaborate further on some of the best practices that can help you stand up your own Platform CoP in your organization.

One of the most important steps before standing up a CoP is to put together a strategy. The more investment you put into the strategy up front, the more successful your CoP will be over time. Below are some of the key best practices to consider.

Define the problem statement and strategic objectives that you want the CoP to achieve. Use this information to build the case for creating a Platform CoP, then identify an executive sponsor and pitch it to them to get their buy-in and be an advocate for the CoP. This helps recruit members across the organization and helps get the CoP visibility with senior leadership.

Include different roles and people from different parts of the organization that are passionate about platforms. Include distinguished engineers, product and risk partners who can contribute from various perspectives.

Partner with product to manage a backlog and focus on the most important work via prioritization. Make sure the backlog items have clearly documented problem statements, which will enable others to pick up the work and drive it.

Encourage CoP members to lead a group. To scale effectively, a Platform CoP must have multiple leaders that can drive a working group to solve a problem to completion.

Prep the agenda, and solicit agenda topics from the community that are intriguing. Discussing interesting agenda topics is a key part in keeping the CoP active. Avoid falling into a status update trap as those can be shared offline.

Spread awareness throughout the organization. Leverage newsletters and forums to market the CoP and provide a page people can access to learn more about the latest and greatest information on the CoP. This will recruit new members and also connect the dots across an organization

Platform CoPs are a great way to make progress on platforms in your organization. They bring together people who are passionate about platforms to collaborate, share best practices, and solve problems. Applying the insights described above to your organization can help you achieve these things and more.