Product teams often face a common challenge: requests that make perfect business sense get turned down by platform teams. These teams might need regional payment integration, new discounting strategies, or custom invoicing features. While these ideas are valuable and well-scoped, platform teams are usually already stretched thin with their existing roadmap. This creates a frustrating situation where product teams can’t move forward as quickly as they need to, risking missed market opportunities and duplicated effort.

Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short

Typically, platform teams have limited capacity. They’re juggling multiple priorities, often receiving three to five times more requests than they can handle each quarter. The common solution is to tell product teams to wait or build custom solutions independently. But waiting can mean missing launch windows, giving competitors an edge, or rendering go-to-market strategies irrelevant. Building separately leads to duplicated work, incompatible systems, and mounting technical debt that platform teams will have to fix later. This cycle often results in burnout for engineers and a fragile platform infrastructure.

Moreover, framing the problem as a zero-sum game—where either platform or product wins—ensures someone always loses. Product teams feel hamstrung, and platform teams get overwhelmed, leading to frustration on both sides and slowing down overall innovation.

Introducing Away-Teaming: A New Way Forward

Instead of the traditional model, away-teaming offers a fresh approach. It flips the usual dynamics by temporarily assigning product engineers to work directly with platform teams. These product engineers build the needed capabilities under platform guidance, creating reusable solutions that everyone can use later. This method doesn’t require extra resources long-term; it’s a resource-neutral way to get critical work done fast.

By adopting away-teaming, organizations can break the cycle of endless requests and delays. Product teams get the features they need without waiting for the platform roadmap to clear. Meanwhile, platform teams benefit from having their capacity supplemented temporarily, helping them stay on top of their core priorities. This approach fosters collaboration, accelerates delivery, and reduces the risk of technical debt piling up.

Overall, away-teaming helps align business needs with engineering realities. It creates a win-win situation where innovation isn’t stalled by capacity constraints, and both teams can focus on what they do best. This flexible model shows how rethinking team structures can unlock new levels of agility and efficiency in software development.

Inspired by

• https://www.infoworld.com/article/4116889/when-your-platform-team-cant-say-yes-how-away-teaming-unlocks-stuck-roadmaps.html

Sources

• teamtopologies.com
• teamtopologies.com
• teamtopologies.com