If you want your platform team’s ideas to make an impact and get adopted in your company, you will need a lot more than technical knowledge. Whether your work becomes obsolete or enables other engineers to be more productive and happy depends on whether you learn to build up your platform as a product.

Why do some seemingly promising initiatives get traction, and why do others not? What makes some teams good at getting support for their ideas and others not? How come some changes increase cognitive load while others reduce it? The answer lies in the team’s ability to discover and align the business and their users’ needs and quickly deliver a solution that moves the needle.

Everybody who tried knows that this is easier said than done. I will teach you to use my favourite blend of Lean Startup, Goal Trees, User Journeys, and Story Mapping packaged in a multi-day workshop format to redefine how we approach the creation of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for any endeavour.

In this workshop, we will practice facilitating a workshop on defining an MVP, through heated discussions to an agreement about how we as a team can start small and validate and adjust our approach as we go.

I’ve frequently adapted and used this method in various projects, from startups to data and event streaming platforms, and the result was always positive: improved collaboration between teams and stakeholders, clarity of the requirements, shorter time to market or lead time for changes, and user adoption speed.