Rootconf 2025 Annual Conference CfP

The talk is about my experience building platform teams for a 10-member engineering organization to teams of 100+ and working with a team of 500+ engineers in an organization.

A business on its journey of building products and doing product engineering looks forward to catering to its customers. Generally, a startup takes baby steps and eventually becomes a Small-to-Medium size Enterprise. As technology leaders, we need to know how to lay the foundation of platform engineering practices in an engineering organization’s evolution journey.

The growth of an organization and the growth of platform engineering teams and practices look something like:

• Early Stage Finding PMF - Initially, the aim is to find PMF, and the only thing that matters is focusing on the product. Everyone is a generalist, and people pick skills, not roles. Instead of doing things ad-hoc while navigating to work towards PMF. One does not necessarily need a platform engineering team, but we can take enough of the right steps.Some of the activities involved in this stage are:

  • Enabling developers with local setup.
  • Building the Devops function with CI/CD pipelines.
  • Having bare bones SRE with basic error rate and uptime alerts.
  • Basic cost hygiene with an eye on and monthly analysis of your infrastructure bills.

• Growth Stage Scaling and Sustaining - The next stage moves focus from validating and iterating to scale and sustain. Here, the focus should move towards stability and repeatability. The team also starts recognizing areas of expertise and starts building autonomy in them. This leads to:

  • Saving time by building repeatable workflows like infra-as-code, GitOps, and basic golden paths.
  • Exploring standardization through service templates, secure defaults.
  • Making the SRE function by establishing practices of monitoring/logging, isolating and governing per environment Cloud provider accounts.

• Maturity Stage: Managing Scale and Complexity - The next transition is scaling the maturity stage. As the team grows, your product and its delivery system shows patterns of predictable behaviour. This blip of stability slowly starts devolving into cracks of larger team topologies solving the same problem in different ways, often characterized by Conway’s law. This lack of visibility leads to unchecked language stacks, ad-hoc delivery practices, hidden security issues, etc.

  Speed needs to give way to governance. Platform Engineering practices, which seemed like an overhead in the earlier stages become a mandatory moat for survival. The organization shifts from growing fast to growing sustainably with systems, governance, and platforms Initiatives start branching out to address:

  • Standard Finops practices
  • Dedicated teams to build Internal developer platforms.
  • Rigorous reviews and uniformity CI/CD practices.
  • Data engineering standardization.

Platform Engineering is the glue that builds teams which deliver you products. But at which stage do you need to carve out these teams? What does it depend on - team size, budget, anything else? How do you calibrate the effort v/s reward ratio? This talk addresses these questions.

I will back up my guidelines with case studies of customers at varying stages of growth.

This talk is targeted towards Technology leaders like CTOs, Directors of Engineering, and Tech Leads. It will also be helpful for Senior Software Engineers with 6+ Years of Experience who are on the path of leading engineering teams.

About Me

I am founder and CTO of One2N (https://one2n.io), a cloud-native, platform engineering, cloud cost optimisation and DevOps practices consulting company based out of Pune.

Over the years, I have evolved from Buzzword Driven Development to Impact Driven Development. A part of my job requires me to talk to CTOs, Director of Engineering, and help them solve problems around engineering and processes.