Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering

It can get tedious. Everyone is clamouring to improve their organization’s software capabilities. You try to install a new tool, or “move to the cloud,” and things still don’t get better. You try to introduce a new methodology like agile development, and things still don’t get better. What we’ve found that’s often missing is understanding how new tools and people change and work together is key.

In this first talk in our Path to Production webinar series, we’ll skip over all the “macroeconomic headwinds are driving a digital transformation urgency like never before” bluster and get right into how and why cloud native tools, agile thinking, and new disciplines like DevOps and platform engineering make improving how your do software easier.

We’ll cover:

Why and how cloud native technologies give you more control over your software delivery process.

New ways of working that take advantage of cloud native technologies.

A checklist to start planning how to start improving your software delivery capabilities.

And, we’ll use real world examples to back-up our explanations.

Here is a secret: tools are incredibly important to improving how your organisation develops software. There are plenty of tech tools that can improve how you build, deploy, and run software: containers, cloud, microservices, automated security scanning, whatever serverless is, and on and on. The tools people struggle with are tools of the mind, "thought technologies." If you need to improve how your organisation builds and delivers software, you're in for a fun ride learning and installing new cloud native technologies, but also learning and installing many new thought technologies.

In this second part of our Path to Production webinar series, we'll cover the new processes and ways of thinking that you'll be "installing" when you're transforming how your organisation does software. We've all read the same books and threads that describe what the ideal end state looks like, but we haven't read enough practical descriptions of how new processes work and why they're a good fit for cloud native technologies.

We'll cover:

- Creating the strategy, vision, and business case for change, as learned from organizations that have done it successfully…and not so successfully.

- Using techniques like OGSM and path to production mapping to pinpoint and plan for changes.

- How development and operations needs to change to take advantage of cloud native platforms.

Changing how 10 people work is difficult, changing how 100 work is very difficult. And, barring Planck's principle, changing how 5,000 or more people work is, typically, impossible. When it comes to improving how large organisations build, release, and run software, scaling to thousands of people is the real challenge. If you're trying to move beyond your initial success at transforming how your organisation builds and runs software, you've experienced this scaling challenge. Thankfully, most of the problems in this challenge are common challenges. Though you may feel cursed and alone, in our experience talking with hundreds of organisations, most of the problems are the same.

In this third, final, part of our Path to Production webinar series we'll look at several of these common challenges and give tactics to address them. Part of applying a tactic successfully is understanding why the challenge exists.

We'll cover:

Building confidence and trust in change by shifting how you build your developer-centric infrastructure from service delivery to product management.

Platform advocacy and marketing. Do you have a t-shirt for your platform yet? If not, better get one!

Engineering and managing the roll-out of changes to large organisations.

Our goal is to give you practical, usable tactics and management tools that we've learned first-hand and from other large organisations.