Engineering Excellence as a Journey: Platform Engineering, Culture, and Technical Leadership
Feb 21, 2025
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Ganesh Datta, CTO and co-founder of Cortex, shares his insights on building excellent engineering organizations. He discusses the importance of treating platform engineering as a product, emphasizing the need for a product-centric mindset. Ganesh highlights how to cultivate a positive organizational culture through accountability and clear goals. He also explores the evolving concept of continuous production readiness and its impact on microservices. Finally, he offers valuable advice for new leaders transitioning from technical roles to leadership.
Engineering excellence is an ongoing journey that fosters a culture of continuous improvement and accountability in organizations.
Treating platform engineering as a product enhances developer productivity by prioritizing user needs and delivering genuine value through incremental improvements.
Deep dives
Understanding Excellence as a Continuum
Excellence in engineering organizations is described as a constantly evolving journey rather than a fixed destination. Success is measured by the ability to operate efficiently, securely, and reliably, while driving business value through engineering practices. Ganesh emphasizes that organizations should continuously strive to improve their processes, reflecting on their past achievements to gauge progress. This view fosters a culture where striving for excellence becomes a part of everyday operations rather than just a periodic goal.
The Role of Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is crucial for facilitating the productivity of developers within an organization. The shift toward treating platform capabilities as products allows engineers to build tools that genuinely address the needs of their users. Adopting a product management mindset enables platform teams to focus on delivering value while understanding the different personas involved, such as developers, security teams, and engineering leadership. This approach ensures that the platforms created enhance business outcomes without overwhelming the end-users with unnecessary complexities.
The Importance of Minimum Valuable Product
The concept of the Minimum Viable Product has evolved into Minimum Valuable Product, which focuses on delivering actual value to users rather than just a bare-minimum functionality. In platform engineering, understanding user pain points and providing solutions to those issues effectively fosters trust within the developer community. By prioritizing genuine value in incremental improvements, platform engineers can enhance user experience and encourage adoption. This strategic approach leads to a more satisfied user base that embraces the platform rather than dismissing it as unnecessary.
Creating a Strong Engineering Culture
A great engineering culture is defined by how well the organization's values are upheld when leadership is not present. Leaders play an essential role in fostering an environment where accountability, collaboration, and customer-centric decision-making thrive. It is vital to define and exemplify the culture that aligns with the organization's goals, which includes hiring practices and rewarding behaviors that reflect desired values. Ultimately, a dynamic culture encourages self-awareness, adaptability, and a collective commitment to continuous improvement.
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Ganesh Datta about building excellent engineering organizations and treating platform engineering as a product.
Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3EtW3R6
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