Colab: Leveraging platforms to achieve speed at scale
Scaling agile engineering organisations is hard.
Today's truly agile organisations are built on small autonomous teams delivering value to customers. Autonomy and empowerment are great cultural traits but they have a dark side at scale -- they can create a lot of duplication and waste. How can organisations get economies of scale without undermining the very culture that they were built on?
This talk is about how REA Group is taking a product approach to our internal platform to drive speed at scale. Our platform is called Colab and we are applying tried product techniques like brand, product lifecycle & customer satisfaction metrics to develop it. Importantly, we're taking an approach that embraces autonomous teams and customer proximity so none of our cultural values are undermined.
I'll focus on the key concept of treating internal platforms as products. I'll tell the story of how REA is doing this and provide some tips for listeners grappling with the same problem in their organisations.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
REA Context
How agile organisations scale, and what hurts at scale
Platform as a Product
Using brand to cristalize the story
Platform lifecycle
KPIs
Platform teams vs Product teams
Wrap up
Learning Outcome
Tips on how to use a product approach to developing internal platforms
Target Audience
CTOs and engineering leaders of scaling organisations