DeveloperWeek Europe 2023

Naphat Sanguansin, Prodvana, Co-Founder & CTO

Building a successful delivery platform can be broken down into three main steps:
- discover customers' requirements
- synthesize desired outcome
- package workflows

Software delivery and lifecycle management are at the heart of all engineering organizations, yet you will be hard-pressed to find an organization where engineers are truly content. Why?

In most companies, product engineering teams are expected to run services in environments set up by their platform teams. While some tooling may be provided, most other toolings (e.g. terraform, helm) are not built with product engineers, the users, in mind. Therefore, product engineers have to become experts in the underlying platform to be successful.

Platforms not designed for their target users are inherently ineffective. Ineffective platforms leave teams in a gridlock. Product teams will not feel productive because they are spending time in areas that they aren’t experts in. They should be and want to be focusing on what they’re good at. Platform teams will be saddled with support requests and unable to make large-scale changes.

In order to maximize engineering happiness and velocity, delivery platforms must be built with product engineering workflows in mind. This means building a delivery platform that allows product engineers to add value without incurring proportionally more (unnecessary) learning or operational cost.

Having built delivery platforms for a wide range of organizations from a 1000-person org to a 3-person team, Naphat shares his experience in how to build delivery platforms that engineers will love to use.