#157 - Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization - Gregor Hohpe

Tech Lead Journal

“Platforms harmonize and standardize without restricting. By standardizing, they actually enable and allow people to do more things."

Gregor Hohpe is back again for the second episode with his latest book “Platform Strategy”. In this episode, Gregor discussed in-depth about building platforms with a proper platform strategy. He began by describing what a platform is from a few different perspectives, the benefits it brings, and what strategy we should think about when building a platform. Gregor also emphasized the opposite difference between platforms and IT services, with the key difference of how a platform thrives with more scale. We then had a few fun discussions discussing building a platform on top of a cloud platform, the key skillset we need to build a good platform, and how we should build a proper platform abstraction. Towards the end, Gregor also covered the recent trend of building developer platforms and business capability platforms. Also, do not miss Gregor’s fun analogy of fruit basket vs fruit salad when explaining a good platform strategy.

Listen out for:

• Strategy Book Series - [00:05:39]
• Definition of Platform - [00:07:58]
• Platform Benefits - [00:12:09]
• Platform Strategy - [00:17:25]
• Platform vs IT Service - [00:20:47]
• Platform Thrives With Scale - [00:25:39]
• Cloud Platform-Based Platform - [00:29:36]
• Skillset for Building Platform - [00:36:44]
• Abstraction, Not an Illusion - [00:44:19]
• Fruit Salad vs Fruit Basket - [00:47:32]
• Developer Platform - [00:51:34]
• Business Capability Platform - [00:55:48]
• 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:59:31]

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Gregor Hohpe’s Bio
Gregor Hohpe advises CTOs and senior IT executives on IT strategy, cloud architecture, and organizational transformation. He served as advisor to the Singapore government, chief architect at Allianz SE, and technical director at Google Cloud’s CTO Office. He is widely known as co-author of the seminal book “Enterprise Integration Patterns” and as frequent speaker at conferences around the world. His accessible, but technically accurate essays were republished in “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know” and “Best Software Writing”. He is an active member of the IEEE Software editorial advisory board.

Follow Gregor:

• Website – https://architectelevator.com/
• LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/ghohpe/
• X – @ghohpe
• Platform Strategy (with special coupon for TLJ listeners) – https://leanpub.com/platformstrategy/c/techlead

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