What if your internal platforms could drive business innovation?

We’ve summarised some of the ideas Mathew presented, a great representation of how we like to work with our clients.

The platform redefinition challenge

It’s time to move beyond traditional platform thinking. Most organisations treat platforms as ‘blobs of technology’ focused on cost reduction through shared services. This approach misses the transformative potential of platforms as innovation accelerators.

His reframe positions platforms as “curated experiences for engineers who are customers of the platform”. This customer-centric view fundamentally changes how platform teams operate – from technology providers to product managers focused on user experience and value delivery.

The gardening innovation cycle

Gardening is a great mental model for systematic innovation:

• Foraging: Actively discovering innovations happening across different teams and business units
• Harvesting: Evaluating and selecting the most promising innovations for platform integration
• Re-commoning: Harvesting innovations and making them available organisation-wide through platform services (X-as-a-service pattern)

This cycle addresses a common organisational pain point – duplicate innovation efforts across large companies. Rather than trying to prevent duplication, this approach accepts it as inevitable and creates systematic mechanisms to capture and scale successful innovations.

The ‘fertilising’ effect particularly resonated: as more capabilities become available through the platform, teams can build increasingly sophisticated products, generating new innovation opportunities to harvest.

Team Topologies as organisational architecture

Team Topologies provides the foundation for platform-driven innovation. The four team types create clear boundaries and responsibilities:

• Stream-aligned teams maintain direct customer focus with end-to-end ownership
• Platform teams exist specifically to reduce cognitive load for stream-aligned teams
• Enabling teams provide temporary capability uplift and knowledge transfer
• Complicated sub-system teams handle algorithmic complexity that would otherwise slow stream-aligned teams

The interaction modes between teams are equally important.

• Collaboration: teams work together for a defined period on shared deliverables. Used when teams need to rapidly share knowledge or solve complex interdependent problems
• X-as-a-Service: one team consumes services from another with minimal collaboration. The consuming team treats the providing team as a black box
• Facilitating: one team helps another become more effective, typically by providing expertise, tooling or capabilities. The facilitating team’s goal is to reduce their own necessity over time by building capability in the other team

For X-as-a-Service the distinction between ‘vending machine’ self-service and ‘butler’ bespoke service clarified how platform teams should design their offerings. Self-service enables speed and independence; bespoke service creates dependencies and bottlenecks.

Voluntary adoption

What can be a counterintuitive insight for some is the emphasis on voluntary platform adoption. Teams choose whether to consume platform services and platform teams choose whether to harvest external innovations. This creates market discipline that drives quality and relevance.

This approach requires platform teams to demonstrate value rather than rely on mandates. If adoption remains low, the platform needs improvement rather than enforcement. The discipline extends both ways – platforms shouldn’t harvest innovations that don’t align with their strategy, even if teams offer them.

Real-world evidence and applications

It was great to hear concrete examples. Amazon’s journey from internal APIs to AWS demonstrated how internal innovation can become external revenue streams. The Singapore Government’s ‘forward deployment’ of platform capabilities showed how the approach scales to citizen services. By enabling asset reuse across business units, platform-driven innovation improves utilisation metrics that matter to CFOs and regulatory bodies.

Implementation considerations

The voluntary adoption model assumes organisations have sufficient scale to generate meaningful innovation diversity. Smaller companies might find the overhead of systematic harvesting outweighs the benefits.

Platform engineering requires mature product management capabilities within platform teams. Many organisations lack the user research, roadmap planning and market sensing skills needed to operate platforms as products.

Cultural readiness represents another implementation challenge to be aware of. Leaders and teams in some organisations may struggle with the autonomy and discipline required.

Learning more about Team Topologies

For those interested in exploring these concepts further, Skelton mentioned several resources during his talk. The Team Topologies book provides detailed implementation guidance, with a second edition out now featuring updated case studies, including from Trade Me in NZ!

The Team Topologies website offers practical tools, including organisational mapping templates and team interaction assessments. ‘Unbundling the Enterprise’ on IT Revolution is also recommended for understanding how APIs enable innovation at an organisational scale.

Related ideas like Wardley Mapping and Core Domain Charts complement the Team Topologies approach by providing strategic context for platform investment decisions.

The business case for platform innovation

For product leaders struggling with platform strategy, platform engineering with Team Topologies offers a path toward measurable business value creation. The key insight is treating platform development as product development – with customers, focus on value, research, validation and engineering discipline. This perspective shift opens possibilities for platforms to drive innovation rather than simply supporting it, making internal platforms become systematic innovation engines rather than operational necessities.

Big thank you to Matthew for coming to NZ and spending time with the Auckland product community!