How to Prevent Your Platform from Standing in the Way of Developer Productivity

As businesses increasingly are seeing, platforms can have a transformative effect on organizations. Companies that implemented the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, for example, got a 228% return on investment on average after just three years, according to industry research by Forrester. A platform is a bounded ecosystem of processes and capabilities to help businesses get work done. The core advantage of modern platforms like platform as a service (PaaS) is that they enable the business to streamline the development of the platform itself. This frees up the business to focus on using the platform to achieve business objectives.

At the same time, platforms aren’t a foolproof investment. Because platforms are developed by third-party partners, a business’s in-house development team often struggles to define a role for itself. In a worst-case scenario, developers end up working on the platform in counterproductive ways, leaving all parties – including developers – frustrated. Fortunately, these situations are avoidable; the key is to be vigilant and steer clear of common pitfalls. Let’s explore four essential strategies for preventing platforms from standing in the way of developer productivity:

• Empower your development team to master the platform itself: In-house developers typically work on one small piece of a platform at any given time – adding a feature, installing an integration, or troubleshooting a problem. As a result, developers often don’t develop a sense of ownership of the platform – in fact, they don’t even develop a full understanding of it. This superficial understanding has real-world consequences for developer productivity, with developers typically spending copious time on issues and producing suboptimal work. The key to overcoming this challenge is to empower developers across the organization to master the platform itself. This investment in developers doesn’t just result in a stronger, more functional platform; it’s also a foundational, best-practices principle of product engineering.

• Establish service-level objectives: Whenever a developer is working on a platform, they need to stay focused on work that advances the business’s overarching, strategic goals. What they instead tend to focus on, however, is what the business tells them to focus on. Typically, that includes SLAs (service level agreements) – for the simple reason that SLAs are what the C-suite knows. As a result, the priorities that get communicated to the development team are often misaligned with priorities that would most meaningfully enable the organization to achieve its overall goals. The key to overcoming this common pitfall is to establish service-level objectives (SLOs) instead of SLAs. For example, a foundational SLO for developers should revolve around platform performance, including attaining consistently high marks for reliability and availability. After all, these are the metrics that keep developers focused on high-value, impactful work that helps a business attain its strategic goals.

• Don’t focus blindly on platform automation: Many businesses assume that they should be taking advantage of every automation capability offered by a platform. This “automate, automate, automate” mantra gets passed down to developers, who then spend disproportionate amounts of time working to enable as much automation as they can. In the process, they lose sight of other priorities, as well as the business rationale for why they are pursuing automation in the first place. The key to overcoming this disconnect is to ensure that developers have a clear understanding of overarching business goals that are driving automation demand. Developers also need to prioritize future-proofing all of their automation, as maintenance of automation will ultimately be their long-term responsibility, not the platform partner.

• Foster a product-minded engineering culture: When organizations adopt a product focus to managing their platforms, it means that they commit to letting their development team make strategic, consequential decisions that affect the platform’s functioning and future. This product-minded engineering culture is not typically how businesses implement and maintain their platforms, but it’s an essential strategy for businesses to embrace. Rather than concentrate decision-making at the C-suite level or similar, product-focused engineering deliberately assigns this responsibility to developers. As a result, developers are much more likely to be invested in charting the platform’s future and taking ownership of every decision they make.

Platforms are often the focus of suboptimal, counterproductive work by development teams, but this outcome is not automatic. On the contrary, businesses can set up their developers to engage in effective work on platforms. The key strategies to keep in mind are to empower developers to master the platform itself, establish service-level objectives instead of just focusing on SLAs, not focus blindly on platform automation, and foster a product-minded engineering culture.

Ippon has extensive, deep experience helping organizations align and optimize their in-house developer's work to build out and maintain platforms. To learn more about how to prevent your development team from losing focus on your business’s most important goals, please check out Ippon’s latest eBook, “The Secret to Boosting DevSecOps and Developer Productivity.”