Introduction

This playbook defines the principles and practices Equal Experts recommend for designing Digital Platforms.

A Digital Platform is a bespoke Platform as a Service (PaaS) product composed of people, processes, and tools that enables teams to rapidly develop, iterate, and operate Digital Services at scale.

To be competitive, your organisation must rapidly explore new product offerings as well as exploit established products. New ideas must be validated and refined with customers as quickly as possible, if product/market fit and repeatable success are to be found.

You might have multiple teams in a brownfield or greenfield IT estate, where your ability to deliver product features is constrained by your technology capabilities. In either scenario, you want your culture, good practices, and speed of execution to scale up as you add more teams.

A Digital Platform optimised for the delivery of Digital Services might be an accelerator for your organisation – if you can make a multi-year commitment to investment. A Digital Platform isn’t a small undertaking, and requires ongoing funding for you to realise the greatest benefits..

Who is this playbook for

We’ve created this playbook to help you and your colleagues build a Digital Platform together. It’s for everyone in your organisation, not just software developers or operability engineers. That includes CIOs, CTOs, product managers, analysts, delivery leads, engineering managers, and more.

We’re strong proponents of cloud-native computing, serverless in all its forms, microservice architectures, and open-source technologies. However, the practices defined here are technology and vendor-agnostic, to allow you to determine the best way to adopt these ideas in the context of your organisation.