29 April 2021
Companies are going full speed ahead into treating their platforms as products. But WTF does that mean? WTF are the advantages? And how the f*#k do we go from where we are to where we need to be?
This WTFinar will be like a time discount. In 90 minutes, you will get insight and info that’s taken years to develop and streamline.
We will explore two different but related concepts that many companies are using together. We’ve got Matthew Skelton, co-author of the acclaimed book, Team Topologies (the Amazon 4.6/5 star rating agrees).
And we’ve also got Jamie Dobson, our CEO, who will share excerpts and concepts from his book Cloud Native Transformation. The book, published early this year by O’Reilly Media, distills six years of experience in how companies successfully become Cloud Native— and the f*#k ups they’re likely to face as they begin to adopt ‘platform as a product’.
What will you learn?
Our favourite part! By the end of the event, you will be able to contribute to ‘platform as product’ watercooler chats. You will understand what it is and what is needed to get there. From risk-reduction patterns, such as Options and Hedges, to the Thinnest Viable Platform, you should understand what to aim for and how to get there.
Who should attend?
- Execs who are expected to work magic; who need to reduce costs as well as Time to Value for their digital products—especially during COVID-19.
- Team leads who have to reconsider how they organise their work.
So, what’s the plan?
Jamie will talk about patterns and how they’re relevant to Cloud Native projects. A pattern is an ideal design, articulated according to a uniform template, that addresses a particular need (a deceptively simple concept, we know).
We’ll look at some specific Cloud Native patterns, including Platform Team. Importantly, we’ll review the typical patterns that are involved in transformation, some common combinations, and how companies can begin to experiment with them. This is the surest way that companies can succeed with platform as a product. It will warm you up nicely for Matthew’s talk.
Matthew will then explain why the platform-as-product approach can be a game-changer for organisations building and running software-enabled products and services. Using ideas and patterns from Team Topologies—including Thinnest Viable Platform, team cognitive load, and the evolutionary team interaction modes—he explains how organisations like Adidas and Uswitch have successfully used the platform-as-product model to accelerate and simplify the delivery of software at scale.
WTF is Platform as a Product?
Savvy organisations (yours?) are seeing the value of treating their internal platforms as products. But WTF does it mean to treat a “platform as a product”? What are the benefits? Why the heck would an organisation adopt this approach?
Cloud Native Transformation Patterns
The Team at Container Solutions knows every trick in the book; because they wrote it. Over the last 6 years (that’s 2 toddlers or 1.5 presidential terms) Container Solutions has been helping companies adopt Cloud Native. With so many lessons from so many companies, they were able to create a pattern language. The Cloud Native Transformation pattern language is a systems design approach based on Christopher Alexander’s ground-breaking architectural method of designing buildings based on a modular set of context-specific designs. Each design, a component of the overall system, is easy to explain and understand, as well as reliably replicable and deliverable in the real world. In short, a pattern is an ideal design, articulated according to a uniform template, that addresses a particular need. (a deceptively simple concept, we know)
In this talk, we’ll look at some specific Cloud Native patterns, including “platform team”. Importantly, we’ll look at the typical patterns that are involved in transformation and finally some common combinations and how companies can begin to experiment towards them. This is the surest way that companies can succeed with platform as a product. This will warm you up nicely for Matthew’s talk.
Matthew Skelton, co-author of the book Team Topologies, explains why the platform-as-product approach can shake things up and be a game-changer for organisations building and running software-enabled products and services. Using ideas & patterns from Team Topologies - including Thinnest Viable Platform, team cognitive load, and the evolutionary team interaction modes - Matthew explains how organisations like Adidas and Uswitch have successfully used the platform-as-product model to accelerate and simplify the delivery of software at scale.
Meet our speakers
Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies: Organising Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Head of Consulting at Conflux, he specialises in Continuous 
Delivery, operability and organisation dynamics for software in manufacturing, e-commerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software. Recognised by TechBeacon in 2018 and 2019 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, Matthew curates the well-known DevOps topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of the books Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016) and Team Guide to Software Operability (Skelton Thatcher Publications, 2016), along with several key reports on SRE. He is also founder at Conflux Books, which publishes books for technologists by technologists
Jamie Dobson, co-founder and CEO of Container Solutions, a professional services company that specialises in Cloud Native transformation. With clients like Shell, 
Adidas, and other large enterprises, CS helps organisations navigate not only technology solutions but also adapt their internal culture and set business strategy. Jamie is the co-author of the new book Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation, (O'Reilly Media, 2020). A veteran software engineer, he specialises in leadership and organisational strategy, and is a frequent presenter at conferences.
