Level-up Engineering
Level-up Engineering
Platform Engineering 101: Takeaways from Building Internal Tools at HubSpot
Interview with Zoe Sobin, Senior Engineering Manager at HubSpot. She tells her story of turning an engineering project into a centralized platform solution and how he managed communication, prioritization and every other challenge along the way.
Sign up to the Level-up Engineering newsletter!
In this interview we're covering:
- Signs that you need a platform
- Getting buy-in for a platform product
- Communication in platform engineering
- Prioritization in platform engineering
- Necessary skills for platform engineers
Excerpt from the interview:
"The original idea for our project was to have one place for all the core reports. It didn’t start out as a platform engineering project; we just realized along the way that we couldn’t easily plug other reports into one place. We needed to build an end-to-end tool, and we had an opportunity to turn it into a centralized platform that scaled across data types, report types and teams.
We built a core reporting platform first, then we worked on our own customer facing applications on top of it. Afterwards, we started talking to teams that had point solutions for reporting about getting these supported by our infrastructure.
The difficulty of building a tool for everyone is that it won’t be perfect for anyone. For example, the email team knows what type of reports their customers prefer, and the centralized tool may not fit their needs. In platform engineering, you have to compromise on some functions and build a central solution that works for 80-90% of use cases."
