In today’s era of technology led businesses, developer effectiveness and experience is key to business agility and building new age engineering solutions.Some key challenges and frictions observed when building a large-scale enterprise system involving multiple teams and/or vendors are - slow speed of delivery, low business agility, hard to do innovation at scale and low cross team collaboration leading to siloed teams and duplication of effort. And due to these challenges, significant time of engineering teams go in mundane, non-value added activities thus reducing overall effectiveness and joy at work!

Our proposal to solve the above common organizational challenges is an Engineering platform which can comprise of various building blocks ranging from but not limited to self-service delivery infrastructure, developer experience portal for knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams and dashboards for delivery and business metrics to track progress. Building such platforms is a long term program and not a point solution, as this needs proper change management and adoption at organization level.

We at Thoughtworks have already done it by building “NEO” - our internal engineering platform!

In this talk we are going to talk about all of the above and also provide guidelines, share tips & tools regarding recommended approach towards building an engineering platform that helps to maximize developer effectiveness leading to better organizational experience and achievement of business goals. We will use NEO as a case study to contextualize why, what and how of engineering platforms.

Outline/Structure of the Talk
- Why and what is an engineering platform? (5 min)
- Five building blocks of a successful engineering platform. (10 min)
- Characteristics & features of engineering platform that leads to better developer experience in overall SDLC. (5-7 min)
- Path to building engineering platform in-house (case study showcase, open source tools & frameworks to leverage) (10 min)
-- NEO, a Thoughtworks internal engineering platform and a developer experience portal (case study showcase, CIO 100 Award)
-- Backstage.IO as a backbone to building developer experience portal (open source tool)
- Patterns and anti-patterns of implementing an engineering platform. (5-7 min)
-- How to measure success?
-- How to apply a thin slice approach for such a large program?

Target Audience:
Technology & engineering leaders at all level from CTO, Head of Engineering to engineering team leads

Prerequisites for Attendees:
Knowledge of DevOps and engineering practices.