Comparison
Enabling teamvsPlatform team
Enabling team
two specialists sat with your team for six weeks, taught you the testing approach, and then left.
A team that temporarily works alongside another to raise its capability, then deliberately withdraws. The withdrawal is the defining feature: an enabling team that stays becomes either a dependency or a shadow platform team. It is the structural answer to a skill gap that would otherwise be solved by permanently routing all work of one kind through the same three people.
Full entry →Platform team
another team's product is your deploy pipeline, and you are their customer rather than their ticket queue.
A team whose users are other engineers, providing self-service capabilities that reduce what a product team must know. The distinction that matters is self-service: a platform team that must be involved in every use of its platform is a bottleneck with a nicer name. It succeeds when product teams choose to use it because it is easier than the alternative, not because it is mandated.
Full entry →