5 mistakes we made transforming to Platform teams in FINN.no
summary
FINN.no organizes ~200 developers across 35 teams and shifts from a decade of horizontal teams to a product platform in 2020–21, inspired by Team Topologies. Five concrete mistakes: assuming platform teams can start without vertical customers, focusing only on two biggest bottlenecks and ignoring others, using a single messy slide-deck before targeted onboarding, confusing platform on top/platform on bottom audience needs, and misassigning people so architects and a Chief Architect become the bottleneck. Build an internal platform only if you need scale, no commercial product exists, and it’s critical to the business.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Sharing mistakes for learning
- 1:08FINN.no marketplace model
- 5:16Horizontal model no longer scales
- 8:27Product platform model
- 11:14Ego derails collaboration
- 18:46Order of transformation
- 24:47Over-focusing on bottlenecks
- 30:10Adapting communication styles
- 48:26Mismatching people and tasks
- 55:19When to build platform
- 58:09Q&A
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