Pioneer teams and how they enable Minimum Viable Platforms

Seeing hundreds of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) brings an interesting perspective. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some incredible organizations that have built their platforms around Humanitec’s products, which has allowed me to dive deep into what’s important to them in terms of their initiative. These factors include speed, efficiency, solid ROI, and delivering an incredible experience for the teams interacting with the IDP every single day.

Part of the perspective I’ve developed across this breadth of experience relates to how the most successful companies introduce a Humanitec-powered IDP into their organization. Generally speaking, there’s a very consistent path for organizations to take along their IDP journey. The first step is to build a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP). The main reason is to avoid the trap that most businesses fall into, which is to try and solve all their problems at once. Which quickly devolves into what we call “complexity quicksand” (when the project scope and risk exponentially increase). The MVP concept is rooted in a lean methodology of starting simple and small, so you can prove value fast using feedback to expand effectively over time. 

Superstar teams excited by new tech 

It takes a very specific type of team to ensure MVP success. We like to call these superstar teams, pioneer teams or just pioneers. In some organizations these are actually two separate groups. We’ve seen names like Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE), innovation team, or even developer experience. In others, they’re a team of application developers and cloud-savvy experts who like to adopt and preach about exciting new technologies. They shout loudly from the rooftops and inspire other teams within an organization to adopt the same technology, and they lead the way down a new and exciting road.

In reality, any team can be a group of pioneers. Teams that are hungry, excited by new technology, and also interested in driving innovation are the perfect candidates.

What it takes to be a pioneer team 

So, how exactly does a pioneer group work? And what makes them the key to a successful MVP process, and the journey towards an effective enterprise grade Internal Developer Platform?

1. Show, not just tell. Pioneer teams know that because they drive change within organizations, they must be able to demonstrate value with new technology. They need to be able to do this quickly on often limited budgets.
   
   
2. Be thought leaders. Other teams within an organization look to the pioneers as a bastion of change, and the light in a dark and scary world of ever-changing technology. If there’s a potential for trying something new and making it work, everyone in the engineering organization knows the pioneers are where to go.
   
   
3. Start small, and iterate. One of the key principles of platform engineering is that iteration is key. Pioneer teams are highly aware of this and quickly can create an MVP that focuses on a representative architecture structure and sample application.
   
   
4. Always evangelize. Once an MVP is built, the fun begins. Pioneer teams evangelize their exciting new Humanitec-powered IDP to other groups within an organization and assist them with plugging in and adopting it.
   
   
5. Never stop innovating. Pioneer teams love to showcase growth and evolution in technology. With new features and integrations into Humanitec products, pioneer teams can constantly demonstrate iteration and improvement on their IDP, and push adoption across their organization. We also take a lot of feature requests from these teams, and work directly with them on evolving their Humanitec tools.

Get started with the Humanitec Customer Success team

There’s no shortage of magic a strong pioneer team can create, and we see it every day with customers who use Humanitec products. As a Customer Success team, part of our goal is to help pioneer teams build upon what they create and “spread the love” to the rest of their organization. Think you’re ready to take on the role of pioneer and build your MVP in just four weeks? Contact one of our platform architects to learn more about the Humanitec MVP program, the best way to get started in a timely and cost-effective way.