Team Cognitive Load as a metric to measure Platform impact
summary
Organization grows from 3,000 to 4,000 people with ~300 product-tech engineers across ~40 teams, and platform work moves from ops bottleneck to an internal Kubernetes/Terraform-based platform that cuts first-deploy lead time to 10 minute lead time. That scale spawns ~4,000 microservices—>1 service per developer—causing a distributed-monolith and high human friction, so the response is measured cognitive-load surveys every 1–3 months and creation of tribe-level platform teams of ~4 people, which show reduced team load and clearer investment cases.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Introduction to cognitive load
- 1:11Defining platform teams
- 3:16Personal experience at fintech
- 5:27Ops team bottleneck and burnout
- 7:14Platform team success and side effects
- 9:01Product teams suffering from overload
- 11:10Foundation teams losing visibility
- 13:55Human problems vs system metrics
- 15:00Assessing cognitive load for impact
- 17:06Investing in tribe-level platform teams
- 19:13Forced platform use and feedback loss
- 20:16Replicating success organization-wide
- 21:42Why invest in platform teams
- 23:08Observing cognitive load trends
- 24:53Faster feedback loops for leaders
- 27:39Measuring cognitive load approaches
- 31:09Scientific basis for cognitive load
- 32:3726 drivers of cognitive load
- 34:45Cognitive load as sense-making tool
- 35:29Summary and platform impact
- 35:55Q&A: Quantifying cognitive load
- 38:45Q&A: Getting buy-in from developers
- 41:13Q&A: Platform team in cross-functional teams
- 44:04Q&A: Scope of cognitive load measurement
- 46:13Q&A: Opt-in vs forced adoption
- 48:26Q&A: Managing team disbanding and morale
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