This session will describe how switching to a product mindset is beneficial to an engineering-driven platform team, and the challenges we encountered along the way.
The container platform is up to speed technically and the most advanced application teams are already running production workloads. But – legacy developers see the platform as a new operations team, are skeptical about cloud-native concepts – and on top of it, the finance team is politely asking: why do we actually need a team of platform engineers? After all, “you build it, you run it”?
This session will present the speaker’s learnings in platform engineering, consulting and sales engineering roles and show how adopting product management practices can improve the situation. In a banking context, it will explain how to clarify the value and benefits of your container platform for developers and other stakeholders, especially by creating a platform architecture that is not only focused on technical features. It will also share how DKB tackled the challenge of bringing a product mindset to an infrastructure team.
Interview:
What's the focus of your work these days?
I am currently working on introducing a product mindset for our infrastructure platform, so that its value is clear for management and users, and this value can be used as guidance for people developing the platform.
What technical aspects of your role are most important?
Understanding how current advances in infrastructure technology can bring value to platform users.
How does your InfoQ Dev Summit Munich session address current challenges or trends in the industry?
I think that IT has evolved from being a cost center, to bringing value while still being managed as a cost center. Now IT has to demonstrate the value it can bring – a product mindset is a way to do this.
Speaker
Stéphane Di Cesare
Senior Platform Engineer, Platform Experience @DKB, Aspiring Platform-as-Product Specialist, Previously @Accenture and @VMware
Stéphane Di Cesare is a Senior Platform Engineer in the Platform Experience team at the German online bank DKB, where he is helping to increase the adoption of the bank's cloud native platform.
Stéphane is focusing on bridging the gap between engineering and users by making the value of technology clear, and helping bringing a product mindset to the platform.
He has background with technology consulting at Accenture, infrastructure engineering at VMware, and in Sales Engineer, Support Engineer and QA Engineer roles.
