Platform Plays: Balancing business urgency with platform scale

In this talk, Sam Wiskow discusses strategies for enabling platform teams to manage business demands while ensuring the solutions they build are scalable. The session will offer insights on creating structures and artifacts that help platform teams resist pressure from customer-facing teams to create non-scalable solutions. Wiskow covers key topics such as the importance of guiding principles to decentralize decision-making, why saying no to customizations is crucial, and how to build a self-serve platform. He will also share lessons learned from iterating on a just-in-time (JIT) platform, managing multi-region services, and the benefits of taking this approach. This talk is framed through the story of how the “Runway” platform was developed at GitLab, its impact on the business, and how platform 2.0 is being envisioned for future success. Learn more: https://platformcon.com/sessions/platform-plays-balancing-business-urgency-with-platform-scale