goals / platforms

src/docs/goals/platforms.md

@@ -3,25 +3,106 @@ title: "Platform"
 featured: ../images/featured/goals.png
 ---
 
-## WORK IN PROGRESS NOTES
-
-- Synthesize the product function
-- Justifying funding for the platform team can be difficult as it is indirect
-  business value
-- Aux Eng allows you to staff a platform team up with senior talent while still
-  directly contributing to business outcomes
-- Knowing the right problems to solve can be difficult. Being embedded brings
-  challenges, low hanging fruit to the surface.
-  - Impossible for a senior engineer to know what it's like to be a junior
-    engineer, or not know the platform
-  - Seeing a junior engineer struggle makes points of friction clear
-  - Engineers experiencing pain don't always realize when something is easy to
-    improve.
-- Giving Aux Engineers 1 day per week to make self-directed investments /
-  explorations in the platform gives them is powerful
-  - Self-direction is powerful. Process adds friction
-  - Short feedback loops. Experience pain -> Solve problem
-  - Writing documentation can be draining, but not nearly as much when you are
-    solving a problem just experienced first hand
-    - You feel like you're helping someone
-    - That person validates and expresses gratitude. Feels rewarding
+In Auxiliary Engineering, we move out to consumer teams from a product team to
+solve problems and learn more about our products. The tools and products that
+an engineering support team puts out are that team's _platform_. Our goal in
+doing this is to enrich the platform, and the experience of those using it.
+
+A Python Platform team would provide tools that make Python simple to use and
+operate. A team focused on testing may maintain a continuous integration
+pipeline infrastructure, or testing frameworks. A Kubernetes-centric team may
+provide templates and automation to make interacting with Kubernetes simple for
+critical team operations and application development.
+
+Our goals through Aux Eng provide benefits to any team developing or maintaining
+a platform.
+
+## Product, Platform, Aux Eng
+
+In [lean software development](http://theleanstartup.com/principles), a software
+team builds code that might solve a problem. The team then measures the result
+through usage analytics or data on the effect their code may have on their
+users. The team _learns_ from those measurements, and synthesizes ideas on
+what to build next.
+
+We believe in this methodology. A goal of any engagement in AuxEng is to
+provide measurement and learning during engagements, then fresh ideas and
+methodology for building off-engagement.
+
+### During Engagements
+
+When an engineer works with another team, they are pair programming with the
+intended users of a platform. Part of that experience includes seeing where
+their products fall short or don't solve a problem effectively. If it takes
+20 minutes to learn how to use a tool that saves 20 minutes, people will likely
+not use that tool. An Aux Engineer can learn this during an engagement, then
+learn the ways that their users _expect_ software or platforms to work (this
+is a less-data-driven approach to _measuring_ the success of any built
+changes). The Aux Engineer can relay feedback and proposed changes during or
+after the engagement (sharing _learning_) to appropriately serve real users
+engaging with a platform.
+
+The contributions an Aux Engineer can glean are hugely valuable. Keep in mind:
+they're doing this not only to serve a platform team's product and roadmap.
+Aux Eng actively moves the needs of the business forward, faster, by connecting
+experts in a domain/platform with others that need help engaging in that space.
+In our experience, that exposure from our team into our user teams is as
+valuable as building a critical change into our platform.
+
+### Off-Engagements
+
+As we've served our goals effectively on-engagement, it's important to
+highlight the goals off-engagement. The perspective that an Aux Engineer brings
+back to a team during an engagement is important. The perspective they can bring
+when they're not pairing 4 days a week with another team is just as vital to
+team success and productivity.
+
+It's a goal of Aux Eng programs to bring perspective and understanding of the
+software landscape and engineering culture back to a platform team. After
+working with teams in one or many spaces separate from the platform team,
+an engineer will convey difficulty that real teams have using products and
+processes back to a platform team. Our goal is to ultimately influence a
+product roadmap or design choices in a system toward the needs of actual users.
+
+## Platform Team Influence
+
+Another goal of Aux Eng is to build stronger relationships across an
+organization or ecosystem. By engaging with users directly, and putting time in
+to understand their problems, a team practicing Aux Eng reaps benefits of
+empathy and respect.
+
+### Adoption and Understanding
+
+It's a fact of software engineering life that we use software we didn't
+write ourselves. This might come from adoption of open source, a vendor's
+offering, or that of a platform team in the organization. In any case, it's
+common for engineers to have a hard time navigating docs or learning about a
+tool or framework to solve their problem.
+
+It's a goal of Aux Eng to provide clarity for engineers in these moments of
+adoption and potential frustration. By engaging with engineers directly,
+solving problems alongside them, and providing reasoning and understanding for
+why tools and platforms work the way they do, we remove much of the learning
+curve and frustration for our products. We also provide a deeper understanding
+for the choices and tradeoffs made in adoption of a platform.
+
+We do this not only to benefit the teams with knowledge of the software we
+write and recommend. We provide this service so we, as subject matter experts,
+never become fully complacent in how we expect our users to think and feel
+about the product offering our platform teams provide.
+
+### Building Relationships
+
+Maintaining relationships as a team serving other teams is crucial. Without
+users to get feedback from, or use software at all, a platform team is not
+fully serving their purpose. When we engage with a team, we spend time pair
+programming and navigating the problems they deal with on a regular basis. The
+understanding of those problems and shared experience will build empathy and
+foundations for a long-standing mutually beneficial relationship.
+
+It's a goal of every Aux Engagement to find "champions" — enthusiastic users or
+adopters of our systems — who regularly provide input and offer feedback on how
+the platform is working for our engineering population. Learning about how
+changes affect users, how adoption is growing, and gauging general sentiment
+from these advocates helps us make better directional and strategic decisions
+on how to operate and maintain our platform.