Roles and Responsibilities
For your frontend paltform initiative to be successful, you need to start with clarifying who owns what in your system. This is not specific to frontend platforms and is a proven foundation for successful systems.
Role of the platform team
Section titled “Role of the platform team”Here the platform team can also be a virtual team or just a few individuals with specific responsibilites.
Enablement
Section titled “Enablement”The platform team is here to enable the development teams. It solely exists to be a multiplier for the productivity of the development teams and so it should treat them as their customers.
Enablement also means it should deliver self-service products that the development teams can use without the platform team involvment.
Governance
Section titled “Governance”The platform team is responsible for defining the core rules and shared capabilities such as local development environment, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), performance and compliance checks. It should integrate with the company horizontal capabilities such as observabilty, A/B testing, tracking etc.
When governance is done well, the right way should be the easy way.
Guardrails
Section titled “Guardrails”The platform team is responsible for setting up the development teams for success and give the best developer experience and feedback loop possible. That means codifying and enforcing guardrails to ensure it’s extremely hard for invalid changes to make it to production. These include code quality gates such as formatting, linting but also automated end-to-end regression tests, performance budgets and automated security scans.
Role of the product development teams
Section titled “Role of the product development teams”Here I am only highlighting the role of the development teams in regards to its collaboration with the platfom.
Domain stewardship
Section titled “Domain stewardship”Even in a large codebase, you can and should create strong owership of code areas. The development teams are responsible for understanding their own domain and making sure it’s well maintained and easy to contribute it (change and extend).
They try to adhere as much possible to the platform rules and reach out when they are blocked by the platform limitations
Feedback and proactive communication.
Section titled “Feedback and proactive communication.”The development teams should proactively give feedback to the platform team, especially when they encounter friction or have ideas on how to improve their workflows. When possible they should also communicate ahead of time on future capabilities they will need that the platform does not support yet so that the platform team can accodomate it in their roadmap. gement