enabling work is hard for organizations to buy into more fully until they see some value so having teams doing a bit of enabling work you need to have some control that it doesn't go. One example that works quite well is from a company called you switch in the in the UK who introduced as a very small sRE team enabling team which does exactly this. They are on the ground with the product teams helping them learn this stuff help them adopt the right tools to help them etc and they are at the same time bringing what they see on the ground to the platform teams that provide services around sRE.
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