"Platform Engineering" is the latest buzzword in modern software engineering. It is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Today's holy grail for platform engineering is to achieve the most effective "Internal Developer Platform" (IDP) that enables the rest of the developers in the company to be as effective as possible. Can this job be accomplished with engineering skills alone?

Platform intersects with product in two ways: first, the platform must be optimized for supporting the development of the company-specific product. Second, the platform must be built with a product mindset and practices for its users - the developers- to adopt it. In this session, we will discuss how to build an engineering platform your engineers want to use. We will go over standard product practices to use when creating the developer platform and the importance of making sure your IDP helps developers build the company's products faster and better. We will define the role of the platform product manager (PPM) and his importance in ensuring our platform is not a glorified Rube Goldberg machine.

In this session, you will learn:

• What is platform engineering? Is it just a new name for DevOps?
• What makes an IDP and a platform team successful?
• Who is the PPM? Why is he important? How do I convince my head of product we need one?
• Practices you can use to build a successful platform and pitfalls to avoid.