Quit wasting your team's time with James Turnbull

In the most recent episode of the Level Up podcast we spoke with James Turnbull, VP of Product and Engineering at Smartrr. James is a prolific engineering leader previously serving as SVP of Engineering at Sotheby's, VP of Engineering at Timber, and countless leadership roles at companies like Microsoft, Kickstarter, Docker, Venmo, and Puppet. He is also the author of numerous technical books, including The Docker book, The Terraform book, and The Art of Monitoring. Today he joins us to discuss the importance of seamless onboarding, the benefits of a turnkey experience to accelerate productivity, and how you should look at building out a Platform team.

Join us as we discuss: 

• When and how you should build out a Platform team (Don’t just rename DevOps)
• Having a product mentality and focus on communication
• Optimizing the developer experience
• How not to waste your team’s time
• Get actionable feedback before tackling DevX initiatives

Timing for building a platform team

We had SREs and DevOps engineers, now we have the almighty Platform teams. The environment for these teams has shifted rapidly and often companies find themselves blending them together or renaming a team to keep up with the trends. But, it’s important to understand the distinct value that each of these teams bring to your company.

The focus of the Platform team should be on blending together the best of DevOps and SRE teams in an effort to support and maximize velocity and stability. 

Now, when to start building that team is entirely different question and there is no one-size-fits all solution. But, some of the key indicators are:

1. If developers are facing increasing difficulties in the development lifecycle, such as complex local development setups, long-running and hard-to-maintain CI/CD processes, and lack of standardized tools.
2. If development teams are spending a significant amount of time and effort building custom solutions for non-core business functionalities, such as authentication systems.
3. If you already have a team handling functions that underpin the engineering lifecycle, like Kubernetes, Terraform, API management.

Optimizing developer experience

It all comes down to clearly defining the goal of your Platform team — going back to the quintessential point that the whole team exists to build something that’s useful for your developers and continuously iterating to achieve that goal.

To maximize impact, a healthy amount of your time (when not building) should be focused on requirement gathering. Just like any customer-facing product, it's critical to gather pain points, needs and expectations from the teams you support. Whether it’s surveys or scheduled check-ins, find a feedback loop that can keep you up to date.

As Turnbull remarks, “The best trait about engineers is their hatred of waste.” So, they will definitely let you know where they feel time is being wasted.

And finally, if you want your efforts to be successful, market your efforts. Often marketing gets a bad rap in developer spaces, but if you want to drive adoption and awareness throughout your organization, you need to market what you’re building. Turnbull advises that engineers know when they’re being sold to or manipulated so keep your communication sincere and involve them early and often.

Want to learn more about evolving your teams and find a promising talent structure? Listen to the latest episode of Level Up on Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you find your podcasts.

‍