This week's guest is Manuel Pais, one of the authors of the book Team Topologies. Many episodes here focus on platform teams and enablement work so I thought to myself who better to have on our show than someone who's written the defining book around these topics? Manuel and I start our conversation with the definition of platform and enabling teams and what their key differences are. We then talk about how to actually do enabling work and how to think about a team's activities in terms of both long-term strategy and short-term execution. And we wrap up by discussing cognitive load, how to measure it, and where platform engineering is headed in the future.
Manuel Pais delves into one of the concepts covered in his book “Team Topologies”: platform and enabling work. Manuel shares how he views the strategy behind when and how to invest in platform or enabling work. This conversation also goes into each type of work in more detail, covering topics such as measuring cognitive load and where platform engineering may be heading in the future.
- (2:13) How enabling teams and platform teams are different
- (10:28) What it looks like for a team to own both platform and enabling work
- (17:04) How to deliver enabling work in an organization
- (22:28) Whether enabling teams should be temporary
- (30:10) Platform team anti-patterns
- (47:10) Measuring cognitive load