When your platform team can't say yes: How away-teaming unlocks stuck roadmaps

"Product teams regularly approach platform organizations with requests that make complete business sense. A team launching in new markets needs regional payment processor integration. Another team piloting a new discounting strategy needs a new incentive construct. A third team building an enterprise offering needs custom invoicing capability. These requests are well-scoped and clearly valuable. Yet platform teams must frequently decline them, not because the request lacks merit, but because the platform roadmap is already full of other higher-priority features and capabilities."

"This familiar impasse stalls innovation, forces product teams into costly duplication and pits business priorities against engineering reality. While various collaboration models exist ( Team Topologies describe interaction modes, or embedded platform experts), these assume the platform team either has capacity to prioritize the work or that product teams should proceed independently."

"Away teaming offers a different, resource-neutral mechanism: product teams temporarily assign engineers to build what they need as reusable platform capabilities, under platform guidance. This is the viable way out of the zero-sum game. Why conventional approaches fail Platform teams face a resource equation that never balances. Demand consistently exceeds capacity by substantial margins. As a platform engineering leader I receive 3 to 5 times more requests than my team can fulfill in any given quarter."

The modern product organization faces a bottleneck where platform teams provide leverage but have finite capacity. Product teams request integrations and features (regional payment processors, incentive constructs, custom invoicing) that are well-scoped and valuable. Platform roadmaps frequently force declines because of higher-priority work. Product teams have fixed revenue targets and launch dates; pricing experiments cannot wait multiple quarters. The impasse stalls innovation, causes costly duplication, and pits business priorities against engineering reality. Existing collaboration models assume platform capacity or independent product work. Away teaming lets product teams temporarily assign engineers to build reusable platform capabilities under platform guidance as a resource-neutral solution.

Read at InfoWorld