> If you need to embed, then actually, you need to embed InfoSec, UX, IT, Customer Success, Product, Compliance, etc. etc. for exactly the same reasons. In today's labor-constrained economy, good luck finding qualified people for every role on every team!
If those people are part of your core value proposition, the thing that's supposed to give you your competitive advantage, then yes (though if you need all of them, you probably don't have a very good value proposition). If not, if they're just a cost center doing commodity-level work, then they don't need to be part of the product team - but in that case you should be looking to minimize or outsource them.
> Product teams need to own their product top to bottom. Platform teams need to make that easy for them, because modern stacks are huge, it's not possible to staff a single team with all the necessary experts, and all that expertise is a genuine necessity. The lines are drawn in different places in different companies depending on available labor and technical requirements.
If the "platform team" are doing something so independent from the products that they don't need to be part of the same team, why are they in-house at all? If you're offering a generic platform, either you're doing it better than Amazon and should be in the business of competing with them, or (more likely) you're doing it worse than Amazon and should just use Amazon.
Someone needs to answer to Compliance, to InfoSec, to Finance. Someone needs to make sure that they all understand exactly what production looks like in their language. Compliance wants to know whether we keep EU data in the EU. InfoSec wants to know whether all our code in production passed security review. Finance wants to prevent costs from spiraling out of control and to judge which projects to fund.
Good luck trying to get AWS's "platform" to do any of that as a managed service, out of the box and without any in-house engineering time!
If those people are part of your core value proposition, the thing that's supposed to give you your competitive advantage, then yes (though if you need all of them, you probably don't have a very good value proposition). If not, if they're just a cost center doing commodity-level work, then they don't need to be part of the product team - but in that case you should be looking to minimize or outsource them.
> Product teams need to own their product top to bottom. Platform teams need to make that easy for them, because modern stacks are huge, it's not possible to staff a single team with all the necessary experts, and all that expertise is a genuine necessity. The lines are drawn in different places in different companies depending on available labor and technical requirements.
If the "platform team" are doing something so independent from the products that they don't need to be part of the same team, why are they in-house at all? If you're offering a generic platform, either you're doing it better than Amazon and should be in the business of competing with them, or (more likely) you're doing it worse than Amazon and should just use Amazon.