Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda cover image

Positioning platform work in a down market | Brian Guthrie (Orgspace, Meetup)

Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

Meetup, Meetup and WeWork - What's Next?

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I started my career at ThoughtWorks many years ago. I spent a bunch of time as a consultant with them. Got to know some of the early thinkers around the dev ops movement there. Wandered off. Did the start thing for a little while. My startups died and sank into the swamp. At any rate, I wound up joining and working at Meetup for alittle while as a director of engineering,. They're working with their platform team. Eventually, his head of platform, his headof engineering were generally at a really weird and difficult inflection point in that company's history.

Brian Guthrie, co-founder and CTO at Orgspace and former VP of Engineering at Meetup, has the unique experience of having previously decommissioned his Platform team. In this episode, Brian talks about that story openly, and shares advice for Platform teams to make sure they’re well positioned within their organizations.

Discussion points:

Brian’s background and story at Meetup - [00:02:20]
Brian’s perspective on Platform work, generally - [00:06:40]
The conversation around dissolving the Platform group - [00:12:05]
Advice for Platform groups positioning their teams - [00:16:55]
Making sure Platform groups are focused on the right problems [00:21:21]
How Platform groups can think about communicating with the business [00:23:50]
Bringing engineering teams into the planning process - [00:25:43]
Deciding to build vs buy in a down market - [00:28:40]
How developer happiness is part of positioning platform work [00:32:30]

Follow Brian:

Brian's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bguthrie/

Mentions and links:

Brian's talk, Is the optimal size of a platform team... zero?
The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering by Charity Majors
Former Shopify CTO's take on the optimal spend on platform work
Research on how developer happiness impacts productivity

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