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Amara Okonjo on rebuilding a platform team from scratch
Amara Okonjo · The Build Log
Amara Okonjo explains how her infrastructure team went from spending eighty percent of its time on maintenance to thirty percent, why she thinks most platform teams form two years too late, and what it cost to spend nine months on internal tooling.
Key takeaways
- Maintenance was consuming eighty percent of a forty-engineer team before the rewrite
- Rewriting the deployment pipeline cut that to about thirty percent within two quarters
- The tooling work took nine months, during which no customer-facing features shipped
- The maintenance curve bends about two years before most organisations form a platform team
Highlights
Full transcript
0:00 host Thanks for coming on. Let us start at the beginning, where does this story actually start for you?
0:07 guest It starts in 2019, when I was still running the infrastructure team and we kept hitting the same wall every quarter.
0:16 guest We had roughly forty engineers and about eighty percent of their time was going into maintenance rather than new work.
0:25 host Eighty percent is a striking number. What did you change first?
0:30 guest We rewrote the deployment pipeline. That cut the maintenance load to something like thirty percent within two quarters.
0:37 guest The deployment pipeline work is what unlocked everything else we did on the platform side afterwards.
0:44 host What is the strongest argument against the approach you took there?
0:49 guest Honestly, that we spent nine months on internal tooling while competitors shipped customer-facing features.
0:55 host You have said platform teams form two years too late. Two years later than what?
1:02 guest Two years later than the point where the maintenance curve starts bending. You can see it in the data long before anyone acts on it.