Definition and objectives

– Definition: Active partnership between platform owners, architects, and delivery teams to remove technical blockers, transfer knowledge, and ensure consistent adoption of best practices and new technologies.
– Primary objectives: increase delivery throughput; improve system stability and security; accelerate onboarding; reduce duplicated effort; and raise collective engineering maturity.

Core activities

– Guidance and design reviews:
– Host lightweight architecture and design review sessions; publish actionable recommendations and ADRs.

– Hands‑on support:
– Pair programming, runbooks, troubleshooting war‑rooms, and ride‑along during incidents and major releases.

– Standards enforcement:
– Maintain and promote coding standards, CI/CD patterns, IaC modules, and security baselines; integrate checks into pipelines.

– Enablement and training:
– Deliver workshops, brown‑bags, office hours, and role‑specific curricula for Devs, SREs, and platform consumers.

– Tooling and templates:
– Provide reusable starter repos, pipeline templates, IaC modules, API templates, and observability dashboards.

– Change advocacy:
– Sponsor pilot projects, run internal pilots, collect feedback, and shepherd successful pilots into official tooling and standards.

Collaboration practices and channels

– Embedded collaboration:
– Embed platform engineers or champions into feature teams for a sprint or milestone to transfer context and accelerate adoption.

– Office hours and clinics:
– Regular drop‑in sessions for troubleshooting, code reviews, and architecture clinics with clear agendas and follow‑ups.

– Communities of practice:
– Cross‑team guilds for topics (CI/CD, Security, Data, Observability) with shared playbooks and a public backlog.

– SLA‑backed support:
– Define response SLAs for triage, escalation paths, and handover criteria for complex issues.

– Asynchronous collaboration:
– Use PRs, ADRs, design docs, and public issue trackers to make knowledge discoverable and reduce meeting overhead.

– Knowledge portal:
– Central searchable hub with quickstarts, runbooks, templates, API catalogs, and training materials.

Training, enablement and measurement

– Curriculum design:
– Role‑based tracks: new‑hire bootcamp, platform consumer, SRE fundamentals, secure coding, and observability deep dives.

– Hands‑on labs:
– Lab environments and short, measurable exercises that mirror common production tasks and failure scenarios.

– Mentorship and technical coaching:
– Regular 1:1s, shadowing during incidents, and periodic code/design clinics to raise team competency.

– Learning metrics:
– Track adoption (templates used, modules consumed), training completion rates, reduction in support tickets, and time‑to‑onboard new engineers.

Roles, governance and operating model

– Role delineation:
– Platform/DevOps team: build and maintain shared services and templates.
– Technical leads/architects: approve designs, curate standards.
– Security/compliance: define guardrails and review high‑risk changes.
– Product teams: implement using provided standards and give feedback.

– Operating model:
– Triage → Assist → Enable → Autonomy: support teams until they can self‑serve; record blockers as backlog items for platform improvement.

– Governance:
– Lightweight review board for high‑risk changes, periodic standards review, and a cadence for promoting pilots into the standard catalogue.

Metrics, common risks and mitigations

– Key metrics:
– Time to first‑response on support requests; number of incidents attributable to integration mistakes; onboarding time; template/module adoption rates; reduction in cross‑team PR review cycles.

– Common risks:
– Centralised bottleneck where support becomes a gate; poor discoverability of guidance; inconsistent adoption of standards; stale training materials.

– Mitigations:
– Automate common support paths; publish self‑serve templates and runbooks; rotate platform engineers to avoid gatekeeping; schedule periodic content refreshes and measure adoption.

Practical starter checklist

– Publish a searchable quickstart for the platform with a “Hello World” template and one pipeline example.
– Run weekly office hours and a monthly architecture clinic; record sessions and link to docs.
– Create two role‑based learning tracks with hands‑on labs and measurable exercises.
– Instrument and track support tickets to identify the top 10 recurring blockers; turn those into platform or doc tasks.
– Appoint and rotate platform ambassadors into product teams for at least one sprint per quarter.