Brainfood Talks

The newly gained popularity of Internal Developer Platforms is obvious. And the well-intentioned attempt to reduce the cognitive load we've continuously built up on engineering teams seems too promising to avoid following. But what when the platform becomes what we wanted to avoid in the first place: a bedrock that can hardly be tamed, devouring the cognitive load of tons of engineers and ultimately doomed to fail? Then we most likely landed in the world of platform monoliths, an anti-pattern being on the rise. Leading to large blast radii, a lack of adaptability to evolution, and heavy losses in overall engineering effectiveness. In this talk, I will share strategies and methods to overcome the fallacies of building platform monoliths while creating a foundation that truly accelerates your engineering pace — leading to a rethinking of how platforms should be envisioned.

In software development, familiar challenges persist: the gap between IT specialists and domain experts, the rush to rebuild older features under tight deadlines, and new systems failing to surpass their predecessors. These issues stem from a focus solely on technical implementation rather than user-centric value. What if we approached development differently? By involving domain experts from the start, validating hypotheses about target customers, and understanding feature contexts before implementation, we could prioritize continuous learning, experimentation, and iteration. Testing features with low-cost experiments before committing to development would become standard practice. This shift requires a fundamental change in our approach to work and progress tracking. Instead of measuring success by the number of implemented features, we should focus on measurable outcomes that contribute to sustainable impact. Continuous improvement becomes the norm, with users actively participating in product development and adopting new features. In this talk, we explore principles of continuous discovery and their transformative effect on software development. We discuss steps to adopt a user-centric approach, emphasizing understanding the "why" behind decisions and involving domain experts. We'll illustrate how a light tower project, focused on measurable outcomes and continuous discovery, can initiate a mindset change across the organization. Join us in transforming software development into a collaborative effort to deliver value to users.