In order to expand their platform, it had to become a self-service product with dedicated software engineers and managers, taking advantage of new technologies. Olga Sermon spoke about enabling platform adoption at QCon London 2023.
The platform team had to transition from doing all the infrastructure work to enabling others to work with the infrastructure, Sermon mentioned. This was an easy transition for the team, as it meant less hassle for their engineers and more creative work: building new tools is more fun than manually running bash scripts, she added.
It was harder to sell it to their users, as Sermon explained:
Many of them still called us the “Ops team”. At first, they simply refused to put any effort into learning how the new tools worked, hoping we’d go back to the DevOps business for them. Some even went so far as to “abandon” them.
Sermon established a stakeholder engagement program with senior engineers and managers across the company, explaining how new tools can increase developer productivity and team speed. She promised that the effort invested in learning new tools would make them more independent. In the end, they saw a complete turnaround: in every team, at least a few people were ready to get involved in the new process.
To be a product, an infrastructure platform must act like a product, Sermon explained:
- Supermarket: Users should be able to use it independently. The platform team will work with users and shadow users during product development to make sure we understand their needs and get frequent feedback. Once a product is in production, we expect it to be good enough for users to operate it independently.
- Flexible: The platform should continuously evolve to take advantage of new technologies and user feedback.
- optional: We do not force anyone to use the platform. But they chose us because our platform is tailored to their needs, brings clear value, and is fun and easy to use.
To ensure that the platform covers enough use cases to help people, they use a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics. In a user group, consisting of individuals representing different teams within the company, they discuss their roadmap and upcoming features, gauge their interest, and answer questions and concerns. They also developed a “problem map”: for each domain within the platform a list of problems they would like to solve and asked users to vote for the ones most valuable to them.
Sermon’s advice is to start by talking to your users:
What are their pain points? What are their hopes? What do they need? What do they not need, but really really want?
Come to an agreement on what good looks like and deliver something that gets them one step closer to it, Sermon suggested. Get their feedback and then iterate. Progress is what helps build trust and engagement, she concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Olga Sermon about enabling platform adoption.
InfoQ: How did you build a platform that is attractive and attractive to teams aligned with the current?
Olga Sermon: Our first idea was “build it and they will come”, where we just build what makes sense to us and hope the users are happy. You can probably imagine how it went: a lot of effort was spent on solutions that nobody accepted.
In our second attempt, we veered too far in the other direction: we asked users what they wanted us to build. This went better (they were happier), however, since users don’t really know what’s possible, it resulted in a series of suggestions that were very difficult to implement and/or would only benefit some users.
The solution we came up with was RFCs: Requests for Comments. Anyone can submit a proposal for a platform feature. All they had to do was explain the context, the problem they wanted to solve and give a rough outline of the proposed solution in terms of technology and user experience. We would then post and publish this proposal on social media, and allow people (both customers and platform engineers) to comment on it. This helps us understand how many teams the problem affects and facilitates the exchange of ideas: some of our clients were able to propose solutions that we had not even thought of.
InfoQ: What are you doing to make the platform easy to use?
Sermon: Draw the steps users need to take, show it to our users and get their feedback.
There are a few practical rules:
- Don’t ask people to do the computing work: ask for the minimum possible information and use it to dynamically get the rest.
- Don’t ask for things you already know: for example, if a user is already signed in, find a way to reuse that authentication instead of asking them to sign in multiple times to different systems.
- Don’t surprise them: be consistent throughout the system, this helps ease the user’s journey and build their trust.
- Measure usage and provide opportunities for in-app feedback while their experience is fresh in their minds.