Building Your First Platform Team in a Fast Growing Startup

Platform Engineering is all about improving developer experience. It’s about accelerating and empowering developers to deliver more product value faster over time. Which makes it the perfect investment for a fast growing startup! But where do you start? And what tradeoffs do you need to make? How do you get developers to embrace the paved road? 

Platform Engineering is suitable for all sizes of organisations, but most companies don’t invest into platform engineering until they reach a certain size. 

In this talk we’ll cover:

  • how we started small
  • what the strategy has been and what tradeoffs we’ve done
  • how the platform gained adoption from developers
  • how the strategy has developed and what the future might look like

What's the focus of your work these days?

I'm leading our internal platform teams, both technical and product, enabling our developers to focus on building a great product! This means not only working closely with the platform teams, but also with all our product teams to understand their needs, pain points, and ways of working. 

What's the motivation for your talk at QCon London 2024?

I want to show how much value you can bring, even to a small organization, when you invest in developer experience.

How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?

Technical decision-makers and leaders from small to medium-sized organizations. With that being said, I think there are things that would apply to larger organizations as well.

Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?

I want them to have an idea of how they can get started, if they haven't already. How to think around such an effort strategically and how to weigh tradeoffs. To get new ideas on how to introduce developers to platform tooling and gain adoption. 


Speaker

Jessica Andersson

PAL DevEx @Kognic, CNCF Ambassador & Speaker

Jessica is Product Area Lead for Engineering Enablement at Kognic, providing products and services for internal development teams. Jessica is also a CNCF Ambassador and engaged in the Nordic and local Meetup communities, as an attendee, speaker and organiser.
 

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Date

Wednesday Apr 10 / 11:45AM BST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Whittle (3rd Fl.)

Topics

Platform Engineering developer experience Startup

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