If you want your product engineering teams to be able to deliver a fast flow of business value to their customers, you need them to have a high degree of autonomy. That includes making decisions about the technology they use.
But there is a problem with this, which is that those teams are making choices that optimize for their needs. Lots of local optimization can leave you with an unsupportable mess of different technologies. It also leaves a gap where there should be global optimization, of the things that matter to the organization as a whole.
You also won't have every skill on every development team, and you don't want every team solving the same problems in potentially different ways, particularly for the problems that aren't core to your business. There are very few businesses where having different continuous integration tooling between one team and the next is a business differentiator!
This is where you need an internal developer platform, providing tools, services, expertise and help. But to do this well, you need a platform team that thinks about their platform as a product, and focuses on what those development teams need.
On this track we will hear about the kinds of developer platforms being built, and what makes them successful.
