Springtime Platform as a Product!

Springtime Platform as a Product London meetup! We have been looking forward to the next meetup so get the date in your diary! You will find an enthusiastic group of professionals sharing their ideas on driving product thinking into building technology platforms. Great discussion, drinks and snacks, a great way to spend the evening!

6pm Welcome:

6:15pm: There's no value in your platform!
Speaker: Jonny Williams (Red Hat) Paul Brown (Red Hat)

Jonny and Paul talk through their clickbait titled blog asking the question 'Does your platform deliver value?' This is the most important question that any platform team should be considering on a daily basis. Countless organisations have retained a traditional approach to platform creation. We will talk about our experience of working across a broad range of enterprise organisations looking at ways to increase value delivery.

Jonny Williams is the best-selling author of “Delivery Management: Enabling Teams to Deliver Value” and works as an Agile Delivery Lead at Red Hat. Prior to this he was a Head of Delivery within the UK Government.

Having enabled teams to deliver value for over ten years, he now supports organisations to uncover effective modern approaches to work.

From his experience working in platform teams where he supported the introduction of user-centric data-informed approaches, Jonny has subsequently worked with multiple global enterprise organisations to introduce a product mindset to their platforms.

Paul Brown is a Solution Architect, who works across EMEA, supporting customers and partners with their platforming journeys. Drawing on over two decades of consulting and technical delivery experience, Paul is well versed in guiding clients through complex container adoption and application modernisation & migration challenges.

7:00pm: Snacks and Networking

7:30pm: Platform Engineer turned Product Manager: Success and failure stories from five years of product and platform engineering
Speaker: Louis Bichard

Six years ago, Lou moved from a software engineer on an app development team, to a newly formed developer experience and platform team, serving 500 internal developers. At that time, there was no platform community, and certainly no concept of "platform as a product". Everything was intuition and guesswork! Today, Lou works as a Product Manager at Gitpod, serving platform teams in a commercial context.

This talk, Lou will reflect on five years of success and failures in platform engineering and product, covering:
1. Why developer surveys aren't as useful as you might think, and what to do instead.
2. Why roadmapping efforts are a trap for product thinking for platform teams.
3. Why enlisting your developers into your platform team is key for adoption.
4. How best to understand your developers through interviewing (it's not as hard as you think)

...and more!

Join us for a practical, real-life reflection on successes and failures of five years of doing product in platform engineering !

8:15pm - 9pm: Drinks and networking