London Platform User Group meetup, Wednesday 24th January, 6.30pm onwards

For our first meetup of the new year, we're delighted to be hosted by the wonderful team at Clear Bank and to have an amazing lineup:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Talk 1: Unleashing Success: The Power of Product Mindset & Customer-Centricity in Platform as a Product

Far too often, platform teams get lost in the technical maze, obsessing over implementation details. The 'build it and they will come' mindset prevails, often to the detriment of the end user. Neglecting customer needs and overlooking the primacy of end users can turn internal platforms into, at best, reluctantly accepted tools and, at worst, unused white elephants.
Join Zenon and Faye as they guide you through their journey of instilling a Product Mindset and customer-centric thinking during a transformative internal platform project for a financial services company. Using an enabling team model, they catalysed cultural and behavioural shifts that transformed user interactions and stakeholder engagement.
The result? A surge in adoption, thrilled customers, and remarkable return on investment. Get ready to discover the keys to platform success, where the end user takes centre stage, and the impact is nothing short of extraordinary.

Speakers: Benedict Steele, Armakuni

• 7.30pm - more drinks, networking & pizzas
• 7:45pm - Talk 2: Paving the Road to Effective Software Development

One thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that autonomous cross-functional teams can deliver business value faster. However, it isn’t possible to have every skill on every team, and we do want all those autonomous teams to build in important things like security, observability and cost efficiency.

Many of these things we care about are best owned by a separate team, distinguishing the platform from the products built on it. This isn’t a return to dev vs ops: the platform team builds and runs the platform, the dev teams build and run the services. That platform team should see themselves as enablers, providing tooling and services for common capabilities like DNS, content delivery, cloud provisioning, observability, etc.; For this to work though, there cannot be either a free for all where teams pick whatever tech they want - and there can’t be a mandated single way to do things. The answer is the paved road, and Sarah will talk about what this means for the organisation and the teams, with examples from her time leading this engineering enablement group at the Financial Times.

Speaker: Sarah Wells - Independent Consultant & Author
Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on microservices, engineering enablement, observability and devops. She has over 20 years experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and devops teams. She spent over a decade at the Financial Times, leading as it transformed into a true cloud native organisation, releasing code 250 times as often and embracing autonomous empowered teams.
She is currently writing a book about Enabling Microservice Success for O’Reilly.

• 8.15pm onwards - drinks, networking

So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.

The LOPUG team.

• Food and drinks provided
• Good time will be had by all