Metadata
- Author: John Cutler
- Full Title:: TBM 341: 10 Tips for Turning Around a Platform Team
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Data team topologies, Data Team Vision and Mission, Prioritization techniques,
- URL:: https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-341-10-tips-for-turning-around
- Read date:: 2025-02-27
Highlights
Even if you need to play external optics games externally, internally within the team, you’ll need to be extremely judicious about scope, limiting WIP, doing the highest leverage work possible, working small, and vetting external requests. I see so many teams make an already hard problem even worse. (View Highlight)
you have to stop optimizing for being underwater. Lots of teams in this situation become more fractured. They try to behave like five teams of one instead of one team of five (View Highlight)
Make aggressive use of enabling constraints. You must become a super-user of enabling constraints to wiggle out of this. For example, only think about external requests every other Friday, create a max batch size (View Highlight)
Keep receipts. I’m sorry, but you will need to track your time inside the team so that you can confidently walk into meetings and give a play-by-play of the current impact of requests, etc. Normally, time-tracking is a big waste of time, but when your team is getting so much scrutiny, and there are all sorts of pet theories about what is happening, you need to commit internally to being hyper-aware of where the time and energy go. (View Highlight)
Full transparency. Keep your queues transparent at all times. Where are the requests coming from? How long have they been in the queue? What is your SLA for getting back to people? What are the cycle times and lead times for requests? How does that impact the time and energy on your platform roadmap? (View Highlight)