What does it mean to be greater than the sum of your parts? It is more than just alignment, everybody moving in the same direction: that would just be a well directed sum.Once upon a time, management talked about alignment because just being the sum of your parts would be great if it was all in the same direction. Now, for everybody obsessed with being a force multiplier, it needs to be more than just that.
You should find yourself more capable in such an organization, but that is a tall order in today's world. Almost every problem you will face has been solved and help is easy to find even on your own. So being in such an organization should make you more capable of solving problems than your base ability. Someone must have already solved that problem for you and the solution must be in easy reach. That's still a tall order, most solutions you find described on the internet are also in easy reach nowadays.
Your platform can also make people less capable. It is easier to be a force multiplier with a coefficient less than one. Make it more difficult to solve problems. Require them to communicate with many teams in order to accomplish anything. Make the solution difficult to integrate and operate and highly non-standard. If the solution is non-standard and the documentation is anything short of impeccable, it will basicly be unlearnable.
The book Accelerate and the research backing it indicates that the most productive teams are able to redesign their entire system without talking to anyone and to complete their work without communication and coordination to other teams. Effective platforms advance that. They make it easy for people to redesign their systems to implement good designs. Bad platforms reduce that capability beyond what a person would ordinarily have and user complaints are brushed off with a tautological, "You can't make everyone happy." Bad platforms narrow possibilities and then require product teams to beg platform teams to allow ordinary designs that were cut off.
I'm on a platform team and I struggle sometimes trying to figure out if we are helping people or hurting them hence this philosophical rant.
> What does it mean to be greater than the sum of your parts?
In my experience it's mostly automation and observability. Delegating as much stuff as possible on tools as opposed to humans, empowering the latter to fix things.
Yes, I agree. Empowering humans to fix problems. It seems to me attempting to prevent people from making problems just creates more problems than it solves. Computers do things quickly with terrible (non-existent) judgement.
You should find yourself more capable in such an organization, but that is a tall order in today's world. Almost every problem you will face has been solved and help is easy to find even on your own. So being in such an organization should make you more capable of solving problems than your base ability. Someone must have already solved that problem for you and the solution must be in easy reach. That's still a tall order, most solutions you find described on the internet are also in easy reach nowadays.
Your platform can also make people less capable. It is easier to be a force multiplier with a coefficient less than one. Make it more difficult to solve problems. Require them to communicate with many teams in order to accomplish anything. Make the solution difficult to integrate and operate and highly non-standard. If the solution is non-standard and the documentation is anything short of impeccable, it will basicly be unlearnable.
The book Accelerate and the research backing it indicates that the most productive teams are able to redesign their entire system without talking to anyone and to complete their work without communication and coordination to other teams. Effective platforms advance that. They make it easy for people to redesign their systems to implement good designs. Bad platforms reduce that capability beyond what a person would ordinarily have and user complaints are brushed off with a tautological, "You can't make everyone happy." Bad platforms narrow possibilities and then require product teams to beg platform teams to allow ordinary designs that were cut off.
I'm on a platform team and I struggle sometimes trying to figure out if we are helping people or hurting them hence this philosophical rant.