Platform vs. DevEx teams: What’s the difference?

They overlap, but Platform teams have a wider scope.

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Platform Engineering and Developer Experience are all the hype right now, and we’re seeing a lot of teams popping up that are called Platform, DevEx, or similar variations. So, what exactly do these teams do? Do the different names reflect any differences in responsibilities? 

To find out, we interviewed leaders from 14 Platform and DevEx teams. We explored their responsibilities and how they differ across teams at companies of varying sizes. Our findings are compiled in the table below:

This table shows all responsibilities owned by DevEx or Platform teams at each company.

These teams oversee a wide range of responsibilities, from source code management and monitoring to training and education. Local development emerged as the most common focus (for example, deploying cloud development environments). Nearly every team we spoke with (12 of 14) also owned continuous integration, source code management, compute runtime, incident management, and productivity metrics. 

It’s no surprise that local development, CI, source code management, and compute runtime are core responsibilities. These areas of work are foundational to the development lifecycle, directly impacting the speed and ease with which developers write, test, and deploy code. Incident management and productivity metrics are additional common focus areas. The former suggests a focus on quality and reliability, while the inclusion of productivity metrics indicates they use data to prioritize their work or track their impact. 

We anticipated that the breadth of responsibilities would correlate with organization size, meaning teams at larger companies would cover more responsibilities. But that wasn’t the case. Teams at both large and medium-sized companies like Booking, Adyen, and Monzo focused on a narrower set of responsibilities, while other teams at similar-sized organizations had wider scope. Based on interviews, this is due to where organizations draw the line between what a centralized team owns versus what product engineering teams own. For example, at OVO, individual teams retain autonomy over certain technologies. As Samantha Betts of OVO’s DevEx team described: “We are there to facilitate and unblock access to resources, but otherwise teams self-manage them. We’ve built and maintained most of the automation around access, and we hold the knowledge of how these services interconnect.”

Another question we wanted to answer: does naming matter? We interviewed both Platform and Developer Experience teams and wanted to see if there was a difference in responsibilities depending on the naming. To find out, we broke out responsibilities by team name, as shown in the table below:

Based on this data, Platform teams tend to have a wider scope of responsibilities than DevEx teams. Additionally, while the teams overlap in responsibilities, the data suggests that Platform teams tend to own more of the work related to maintaining infrastructure and handling incidents—see the Run category, where Platform teams are heavily present and DevEx teams are not. Another distinction is with Developer Training and Education, which only came up as a responsibility for DevEx but not for Platform. This isn’t surprising, given that DevEx teams tend to frame their mission more in terms of enablement versus tooling. 

So why do some teams choose the name Developer Experience while others opt for Platform Engineering? We asked a few leaders to share their perspectives: 

• Twilio’s Jesse Adametz said, “We named the team Developer Platform because we’re building multiple teams focused on Platform Engineering. It’s inclusive of several critical areas within the developer ecosystem, with a rigor distinct from a sole focus on Developer Experience.”

• At Booking.com, Leo Kraan noted, “We use the name Developer Experience for our team because it is more customer-focused. Besides that, we already have a Platform Engineering team that looks after areas like our data centers, compute platforms, and networking and traffic management.” 

• OVO’s Samantha Betts provided another perspective: “I have always referred to my team as ‘DevEx’ because the term is becoming well understood in the industry, though it can vary by company. Lately, I prefer to think of DevEx as a concept rather than a team name. Any team—Platform, SRE, Infrastructure—that reduces cognitive load for tech teams is practicing DevEx.”

• At Yelp, Mitali Parthasarathy described how their Engineering Effectiveness teams focus on improving developer experience and productivity, managing build and release pipelines, and automating large-scale code migrations. “Our platform engineering teams, however, concentrate on scalable, reliable infrastructure across networking, data, and security that forms the backbone for all other tooling,” she explained.

Some teams are also taking on names like Developer Productivity, Developer Acceleration, or similar. In some cases, like at Monzo Bank, these are simply other names for a DevEx team. Fabien Deshayes explained why they named their DevEx team Developer Velocity: “We’ve had a Platform group at Monzo for around 5+ years. Originally, it had the following mission: Build and run the platforms and capabilities that enable us to scale globally. In other words, to build and operate the horizontal layer that powers the rest of our bank. As that group scaled, we created our Developer Velocity squad which, while also building "platform"-type products, is really focusing on tackling bottlenecks.” 

In other cases, Engineering Productivity covers a broader scope, encompassing both Platform and DevEx functions. At Ocado Technology, Mariusz Łuciów shared that they use Engineering Productivity because their vision is about engineers in the company being productive. They achieve that by leveraging platform and enablement through tooling. 

In an upcoming issue, we’ll explore team structures and the tools they support.

Thank you to everyone who contributed and provided feedback on this article, including: Samantha Betts, Leo Kraan, Fabien Deshayes, Mariusz Łuciów, David Betts, Mitali Parthasarathy, Matthew Schrepel, Mateusz Grabowski, Russ Nealis, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Sam Gorial, Sergey Chernov, Jesse Adametz, and those who contributed anonymously.

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Data on Developer Productivity teams

Read our new report that summarizes the research we’ve produced this year on Developer Productivity teams.

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Who’s hiring right now

Here’s a roundup of Developer Productivity job openings. Find more open roles here.

• Snowflake is hiring an Engineering Manager - DevEx | San Mateo

• Pinterest is hiring a Senior PM - Infrastructure | San Francisco

• SiriusXM is hiring a Staff Software Engineer - Platform Observability | US

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-Abi