Unlock platform engineering success with self-service

Nothing is more frustrating than needless delay. At Equal Experts, we think about time to value as the time between having an idea and putting it in the hands of your users, and a common source of delay is waiting days/weeks for a platform team to complete a task, which takes them time to complete.

Our key insight here is platform teams need to get out of the way, and we recently saw this at a major B2B financial services firm. They needed to deploy a business-critical application called Services Builder for their clients, often on short notice for short, fixed-time periods.

The unintentional go-slow

When we investigated, we found the following problems:

• Slow client onboarding time. Revenue realisation was delayed by manually provisioning a new client

• Slow deployment frequency. Innovation was slowed down by delivering new features and defect fixes only every three to six months

• High operational costs. Cloud bills soared due to dedicated tenant environments and inconsistent configurations

• Unable to scale. The underlying infrastructure could only scale to 50-60 tenant environments, limiting the number of clients that could be serviced

The problem was the service-orientated model, not the skilled, hard-working people on the platform team. Platform engineers had to perform every deployment on behalf of Service Builder client teams, creating a single point of failure that was slow to deliver.

Get out of the way

We worked with the financial services firm to ensure the platform team created the right capabilities for Service Builder client teams and then got out of their way. It wasn’t about optimising the platform team’s processes; it was about eliminating them as a dependency. We worked with our client to shift the platform team to a self-service provisioning model, where Service Builder client teams could provision their own application instances. This required two key changes:

1. Create a template repository leveraging Terraform and GitHub, which allowed teams to follow a simple set of steps and provision a new instance in just 30 minutes
2. Re-architect the application for automated CI/CD pipelines and standardise cloud resources across all application instances

Velocity, scale, and savings

This shift to a self-service model yielded truly transformative results:

By identifying the dependency bottleneck and addressing it with product-led thinking, we co-designed with our customer a self-service solution that met the needs of all the teams, achieving tremendous agility alongside significant cost reductions.

The lesson is clear: platform teams need to get out of the way. Look for the handoff, the dependency, the manual step, and build self-service platform capabilities to abolish it. That is where true platform engineering success is unleashed.

About the author

Edd’s expertise spans software engineering, technical architecture, and high-performing organisational culture. Drawing on experience as the architect of HMRC’s digital tax platform, he provides strategic guidance in complex, multi-team environments.

Edd is passionate about building capabilities from the ground up, prioritising openness and learning to ensure delivery success is achieved through alignment between culture and code. He shares this experience with engagement teams and clients across the USA, UK, and Europe. Connect with Edd on LinkedIn.