Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda cover image

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

Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

What Happened After Meetup's React Platform?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Meetup had hired a couple of spectacularly talented web developers who built a React platform for doing server-side rendering. The company decided that some of that work could and should be absorbed by the product engineering teams themselves. "Can we afford this, right? Is it meaningful for us to continue to support our own bespoke tooling?" asked meetup's chief technology officer.

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

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.

App store banner

Play store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode