How to make your internal platform team successful

Over the past few years, I have worked with many internal development platform teams. While some of them struggled, there were a few teams that created immense leverage, productivity gains, and successes for their customers.

They all shared the same principle: they operated as a small company within their company. When you start digging deeper, it’s not surprising that these teams were incredibly more successful. By operating as a small business, these teams began to develop traits that made them operate and build products better.

These teams started with their customers in mind, so they conducted regular customer interviews to make sure their solutions were solving their customers’ biggest pain points. They also set out to deliver quickly and in small iterations (read about the power of iterations) so they could get early customer feedback and deliver value to them as fast as possible.

While they were also leveraging other platform teams and company resources, they were also pragmatic about their own, looking to improve and even automate their internal processes in order to scale their operations without necessarily adding headcount.

Finally, successful internal platform teams have their own vision (in line with the business and why the team exists, of course), which helps give them a purpose and agenda as well as formulate long-term plans in order to better serve their customers and contribute to their company’s long-term success. If you’re building an internal platform team, try giving them the goal of operating as if they were their own small company!