Platform teams have become my bread and butter. They come with an interesting set of challenges. One of the biggest of those, and the reason it can be a challe

Platform teams have become my bread and butter. They come with an interesting set of challenges. One of the biggest of those, and the reason it can be a challenging position to be in, is that the person managing the team, coming up with the vision and roadmap, and even the architecture direction are often the same person. Few people around you are experts in building a good vision, strategy, or roadmap for a platform organization. It’s a skill set heavily overlapping with product strategy but also completely divergent. If you’re in this position, you’ll be doing several of these things poorly at any given point in time. (My current employer sits on the opposite side and has made sure we have a fully engaged product partner to do this well, which is a breath of fresh air. It's a much different working relationship than with a product partner in user-facing teams) It’s a high leverage position and can provide a center of excellence for the rest of the organization to emulate. You tend to be very visible among developers in the org if you’re doing it well, and you drive a lot of cross-cutting architectural goals. On the team building side, hiring people that thrive doing platform work can also be tough! It’s lower visibility, but provides a unique set of technical challenges and an opportunity for building technical breadth you find in few other roles. Early on in your career can be a great time to explore this sort of work. Repetition is low, and you build a lot of tech chops through the work. Try to be somewhere where it seems like a first class citizen in the organization ecosystem with engagement from product, too. And for what it's worth, I don't think your general goal should be to attempt to build over buy. Helping teams adopt and successfully use paid-for tools is a big part of the gig.