Team topologies series: Product teams and Platform teams

A common term for describing teams developing digital solutions Is Product teams. Product teams exist to create business value and have a mandate which scopes what their responsibility is. 

Members of product teams, are interested in knowing why they are building what they are building not just what. They take great pride both in their individual contribution and in collaboration with others within same discipline as well as other disciplines. Through that collaboration they are able to design and build amazing digital solutions.  

In some businesses, product teams are created and developed only to be feature teams. This means another part of the business defines what is to be solved and hands over the defined task for development. In empowered product teams, the main difference is that issues are addressed to the product team as a whole. Rather than getting a feature to build they get an issue to solve.

Another aspect that might influence the empowerment of product teams is topology. Product teams exist for creating business value. Therefore a product team should have areas of ownership that match the outcomes that the business needs.

Some examples of alignment between product team topology and business might be organized by:  

• User type or persona 
• Market segment 
• Customer journey 
• Sales channel 
• Business KPI 
• Geography  

The reason for organizing product teams in this way is that the translation between business outcomes and product work is low, and the teams can be given autonomy to solve business problems directly.

Given that the organization has an efficient team typology, the teams are responsible for how the product is experienced. This in forms of apps, UIs, solutions or user-journeys. There might be customer-facing teams or customer-enabling teams. The difference is if their end user is a customer or employee of a customer. In an insurance company this might be; a customer who wants to buy insurance in our webshop or a claims-handler who is processing a reported claim. In both cases the product team is responsible if the product goes down; wither it is the webshop or a claim handler's solution that is damaged, it has an influence on the product experience. In empowered product teams the product experience is a topic the team is concerned about and dedicated to improve continuously. 

Even though many companies have several product teams in their digital development, some of those companies have also found the need for having other types of teams in addition. This can include platform teams, which provide tools and services in a powerful way: developed once but ready to be used time and time again.

While the product teams are responsible for how the product value is exposed to users and customers, the purpose of a platform team is to manage services so they can be easily leveraged by other teams. Platform teams therefore reduce the cognitive load for product teams. 

The main focus for platform teams is to provide common services that are developed at a single source, but used in many places. Examples of this might be responsibility for:

• shared services i.e authentication or authorization
• maintaining a library of reusable interface components
• providing tools to developers for test and release automation 

Other approaches might be that platform teams encapsulate difficult or specialized areas of a product: 

• abstraction of integration with legacy system
• payment processes 
• tax calculation 

The work from a platform team may not be directly visible by the end customers - or even executives and stakeholder, and therefore it might mislead the organization to think that they are not important. This is not the case. In many of the top product organizations, the company's best engineers are asked to work on platform teams because of the leverage and importance. In large, top tech companies, as many as half of the product teams are platform teams. 

When organizing and supporting platform teams in an optimal way, these teams are able to reduce the cognitive load of product teams. Product teams are able to use platform services without having to fully understand how they are implemented. Instead they can focus their energy on the customer and business problem that they are going to solve.