If your company has a “DevOps” team, is that a step in the right direction or proof that you’ve totally missed the point? At FullStory we have a Platform team, which builds things to make life easier for the other engineering teams. Usually that works well; but sometimes, not so much.

What’s the proper role of a “DevOps” team? Or is any such team flawed by design?

At FullStory, we embrace “you build it, you run it”, but the specifics of how we implement this philosophy have evolved over time. In the early years the company was small enough that all engineers participated equally on a single team. As we grew and divided into sub-teams, we found that introducing a “Platform Engineering” team was valuable for creating and maintaining common tools, libraries and processes shared across all of engineering. Looking back over the company’s young lifetime (6 years and counting), what has gone well with this system and what hasn’t? In particular, can these lessons apply more generally to other companies?