These days everyone is building a 'platform' to speed up delivery of digital products at scale. But what makes an effective digital platform? Some organisations stumble when they attempt to build on top of their existing shared services without first addressing their organisational structure and operation model.

Infrastructure Platform teams enable organisations to scale delivery by solving common product and non-functional requirements with resilient solutions. This allows other teams to focus on building their own things and releasing value for their users. But nobody said building scalable platforms was easy... In this article Poppy and Chris explore 7 key principles which can help you build the right thing right. Spoiler: don't skip strategy, user experience and research.

A Foundation Platform is a that is built prior to any application that are built on top of it. The idea is that you analyze the needs of the various applications that need the platform, then you build the platform. Once the platform is complete you then build applications on top of it. The point is that the platform really needs to have a stable API before you start work on the applications, otherwise changes to the platform will be hard to manage due to their knock-on effects with the applications.

To build a platform by harvesting, you start by not trying to build a platform, but by building an application. While you build the application you don't try to develop generic code, but you do work hard to build a well-factored and well designed application.