Building a Platform Team

Mason Jones recently started a new role at Zapier, where he’s bringing his platform leadership experience from Lattice and Credit Karma.

In this episode, Mason shares his thoughts on what makes a platform team work, common tradeoffs in platform development, and the challenges of making your team’s work visible and understandable to the whole organization.

Find the transcript at: https://www.unblocked.fm/episodes/mason-jones-zapier/

Timestamps (0:00) Introductions (0:39) Mason’s journey to Zapier (4:39) How Mason joined the platform team (8:48) Naming teams (11:10) The mechanics of reorienting (15:46) Transitioning from infrastructure to platform (20:44) Goal-setting using data (24:39) Mason’s take on product managers (28:48) Detangling a monolith into services (33:49) Federating vs. centralizing (37:04) How Mason approaches standardization (41:22) How to communicate (44:58) The value of case studies (47:08) What Mason wants to achieve in a year

Follow Mason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/masonjones/

Follow Rebecca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/

Links and mentions • Zapier: https://zapier.com/ • Credit Karma: https://www.creditkarma.com/