Discovery for Technical Platform Teams

TechLab by Bol

There are two pillars in this episode. We start with the Technical Platform at bol.com. We'll explore what type of software engineering these teams are working on and what they are trying to achieve for the rest of our engineering community. The other part is Product Discovery. We try to figure out what problems we are solving in the discovery phase. While doing this we keep our focus on the Technical Platform and try to uncover how these specific challenges are solved.
What this episode covers

• The Technical Platform:
  • What are we trying to achieve by having Technical Platform teams?
    • Which product are they working on?
  • How differs their setup from product teams?
  • Are there other things that are different?
• Product Discovery:
  • What – in general – are we trying to achieve during Product Discovery?
    • Which problems are we solving?
    • What roles should be involved to do this well?
    • How to document those?
  • What are the questions we ask ourselves during this phase?
  • How to keep a good pace? The “customers” are facing a problem now and also expect an instant solution.
  • Is this different for Platform Products?
    • What aspects need additional attention?
    • How well do engineers in the Platform Space know the challenges engineers in product teams are facing?
      • How to get a common understanding of their problems?

We wanted to stay away from discovery techniques as Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, Opportunity Solution Tree, Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas. Let us know if you want a specific episode on these techniques.

Guests

• Taco Bakker – Head of Product in our Technical Platform
• Onno Ceelen – Group Product Manager Engineering Productivity
  • You might recall him from his appearance in the episode on engineering productivity roughly 2 years ago.

Notes

• The Axle framework is one of the products our platform teams work on.
• We use Backstage as our Developer Portal
• The Axle framework is one of the products our platform teams work on.