These days everyone is building a 'platform' to speed up delivery of digital products at scale. But what makes an effective digital platform? Some organisations stumble when they attempt to build on top of their existing shared services without first addressing their organisational structure and operation model.

Infrastructure Platform teams enable organisations to scale delivery by solving common product and non-functional requirements with resilient solutions. This allows other teams to focus on building their own things and releasing value for their users. But nobody said building scalable platforms was easy... In this article Poppy and Chris explore 7 key principles which can help you build the right thing right. Spoiler: don't skip strategy, user experience and research.

Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.

Developer productivity platforms are increasingly recognised as a way to manage the cognitive load of engineering teams and decrease time to market for new features. However, there are baseline capabilities that organisations need to cultivate in order to successfully execute on a plaform strategy. The platform team needs to think of the platform as a software product, needing dialog with its users, attention to reliable operations, and a healthy team environment.

A Foundation Platform is a that is built prior to any application that are built on top of it. The idea is that you analyze the needs of the various applications that need the platform, then you build the platform. Once the platform is complete you then build applications on top of it. The point is that the platform really needs to have a stable API before you start work on the applications, otherwise changes to the platform will be hard to manage due to their knock-on effects with the applications.

To build a platform by harvesting, you start by not trying to build a platform, but by building an application. While you build the application you don't try to develop generic code, but you do work hard to build a well-factored and well designed application.

Any large software effort, such as the software estate for a large company, requires a lot of people - and whenever you have a lot of people you have to figure out how to divide them into effective teams. Forming Business Capability Centric teams helps software efforts to be responsive to customers’ needs, but the range of skills required often overwhelms such teams. Team Topologies is a model for describing the organization of software development teams, developed by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. It defines four forms of teams and three modes of team interactions. The model encourages healthy interactions that allow business-capability centric teams to flourish in their task of providing a steady flow of valuable software.