Chapter 2: Platform Advocates

In the previous article, I mentioned that first and foremost, the platform should be treated as a real product, one that is put on the market, marketed, and measured.

A good strategy that will help you assimilate the platform in development teams is choosing Platform Advocates.

Who are the Platform Advocates?

The selected developers who are familiar with the platform but in addition are the biggest believers in the new way of working and self-service culture.

The Platform Advocates are the users who initiate improvements themselves and see the platform as a collaborative tool in the organization and not a tool that is the absolute responsibility of a specific team.

The 2 main roles of the Platform Advocates:

• Help the platform team to receive precise requirements and important feedback from the users. The advocates are team members in the development teams, your customers; they hear the daily complaints and feedback regarding the use of the platform much more than you and in a much more authentic way, so ask them to coordinate everything, open tickets for problems that arise, and more.
• Assist in the implementation of the platform via technical training on the part of the development teams (not training for the use of the platform, but training for integration between the platform and the new way of working with the development team).

In brief, the Platform Advocates are just like the customers who come to the conference and explain their use of a certain tool and talk about how much it helped them and how much it is recommended and even collaborate with the product builders to achieve a better product market fit.

Read the last chapter → Chapter 3 (Bonus): Think PLG, internally