Platform Teams with Ganesh Srinivasan

I don’t think anyone has platform teams fully figured out. We know they are especially important when scaling up fast-growing organizations, and they are key building blocks for all large tech companies. But how do you decide when to start your first platform team? How do you convince the C-level decision-makers to fund these? And what percentage of your engineers do you allocate to platform efforts?

I sat down with Ganesh Srinivasan, someone who has built several platform organizations, and has tackled all of these questions. We talked about his takes on the above challenges, and more.

Ganesh managed the mobile engineering group at LinkedIn and has been VP of Engineering at Uber, building up the mobile platform organizations from scratch, among other achievements. He is currently Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Confluent, building an event-streaming platform that handles real-time data at a massive scale.

The first time we met, both of us worked at Uber. I had recently joined the…