Mastering Platform Engineering – From Design to Value (2 Day Bootcamp)
Park Plaza Victoria London or Online
May 14–15, 2026 (Thursday–Friday) | 9:00–17:00
May 14–15, 2026 (Thursday–Friday) | 9:00–17:00
CONFERENCE STARTS IN:
5 Reasons to join
the Bootcamp
Enhance your productivity
While you concentrate on what you do best - writing code - the infrastructure and the tool box is taken care of
Less stress through streamlining
Automated tasks and simplified processes significantly reduce cognitive loads
Scale your organisation with ease
Employ a framework that grows alongside your organisation’s needs
Meet new demands
Rapid technological changes require new solutions. Adopt a robust foundation to weather the coming demands
Threat limitation
Reduce your area of attack with pipelines fitted with security and compliance measures
Description
AI has an extensive impact on our lives, from music recommendations to autonomous driving. Companies need to leverage advanced AI systems to stay competitive and create innovative customer offerings. But what does this mean, from a technical perspective, for your business?
In this bootcamp, we want to introduce software professionals to modern Machine Learning problems, in order to develop in one day the understanding of where the journey could go in their own company. We’ll look at the basics of supervised and unsupervised learning, discuss the flood of data that needs to be managed and its quality; and round it all off with some MLOps topics.
The goal is not to train experts in one day, but to make software experts aware of what challenges can arise with ML in future software projects.
Agenda Day 1
1. Understanding Your Platform Ecosystem
| We begin by establishing a clear picture of your current platform and delivery landscape | |
| Each participant will map their own developer users, value chains, capabilities, and dependencies | |
| Using tools like User Needs Mapping and Wardley Mapping, you will visualise how your platform fits into your wider organisational system |
2. Mapping Flow and Feedback Loops
| Delivery flow depends on fast, reliable feedback, so you will learn to identify where loops break or slow down | |
| You will explore real-world friction points such as bottlenecks, hand-offs, cognitive load, and regulatory constraints | |
| We will apply OODA loops to model how your teams observe, orient, decide, and act when delivering software | |
| Understanding these loops provides the foundation for diagnosing platform friction and designing improvements | |
| You will build your first OODA Loop Canvas for your platform |
3. Introducing Platform-as-Product Thinking
| Platforms succeed when treated as products, not internal tooling, so we introduce the core principles of product thinking for IDPs | |
| You will identify your key developer journeys and examine how platform capabilities support or impede them | |
| We explore what “developer experience” means in practice and how to measure and improve it | |
| This sets the stage for designing capabilities that developers actually want to adopt |
4. IDP Pattern Language: Foundations of Good Platform Design
| You will learn the essential building blocks of Internal Developer Platforms | |
| Concepts include Golden Paths, self-service, guardrails, abstraction layers, composability, and observability | |
| We discuss why some abstractions empower developers while others restrict them | |
| This section provides a shared language for discussing platform design decisions across teams |
5. Organisational Forces and Architecture
| We examine Conway’s Law and how organisational boundaries shape the effectiveness of platform teams | |
| You will identify mismatches between team structure, platform design, and expected outcomes | |
| We explore common failure modes caused by unclear ownership, overlapping responsibilities, or tool sprawl | |
| Understanding these forces is key to align architecture, governance, and delivery practices |
6. Synthesis Mapping Session
| You will bring together all the mapping tools introduced during the day | |
| Participants create a first-pass User Needs Map, a value-flow heat map, and an initial platform review | |
| This process highlights where the platform is working well and where change will have the highest impact | |
| We close Day 1 by identifying a small experiment that each participant could run immediately |
Agenda Day 2
1. Applying DSRP Systems Thinking
| We start Day 2 by introducing DSRP: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives | |
| You will revisit yesterday’s maps to uncover blind spots and hidden dependencies | |
| This provides a rigorous method for analysing complex socio-technical environments | |
| DSRP becomes a lens that enhances all further platform design work |
2. Constructing a 3-Axis Flow Map
| We combine User Needs Mapping, Value Stream Mapping, and DSRP into a unified diagnostic model | |
| You will map how user needs to unfold over time across teams, capabilities, and tools | |
| This highlights delays, waste, rework, context-switching, cognitive load, and risk points | |
| The 3-axis map becomes the definitive view of your platform’s current state |
3. Designing Your Future Platform State
| Using your diagnostic maps, we shift from analysis to design | |
| You will identify the smallest viable changes that unlock significant flow improvements | |
| We explore capability increments, migration paths, and safe-to-fail experiments | |
| This creates a realistic, evolvable, and technically grounded future-state platform design |
4. Building an Impact Roadmap
| With the future design defined, participants prioritise improvements based on value, risk, and cost | |
| We explore sequencing strategies, dependency management, and incremental rollout | |
| You will build a value-aligned roadmap that is suitable for communication with stakeholders or leadership | |
| This section ensures your platform evolution is intentional rather than reactive |
5. Adoption & Influence Strategies
| A platform only delivers value when developers actually use it, so we focus on the Elephant & Rider model of behaviour change | |
| You will identify the emotional and rational adoption drivers specific to your organisation | |
| We discuss messaging, internal marketing, documentation styles, and team engagement patterns | |
| You will create an adoption and influence plan tailored to your context |
6. Platform Futures & Final Synthesis
| We close by exploring emerging trends: AI agents, automation loops, self-healing systems, and resilience patterns | |
| Each participant updates their platform review based on everything learned | |
| You will leave with a clear set of maps, artefacts, and experiments to continue after the workshop | |
| Final Q&A and reflection |
Audience & Requirements
This bootcamp is ideal for platform engineers, SRE/DevOps practitioners, architects, and engineering leaders who want to deepen their platform engineering practice and bring structured, evidence-based improvements back to their teams.
This bootcamp is crafted for practitioners responsible for enabling developer velocity and reliability through internal platforms.
To get the most from the bootcamp:
| Bring your real-world context: your teams, your tools, your blockers. | |
| You should have access to (or knowledge of) your team’s software delivery process (CI/CD, service onboarding, developer feedback loops). | |
| A working understanding of cloud/containers/modern delivery is helpful—but not essential. | |
| Bring a laptop and access to a whiteboard or Miro-type board; you’ll build real artefacts live. | |
| Most importantly: come prepared to listen, map and experiment, not just consume slides. |
Meet The Mastermind
Russell Miles
Russ Miles is on a mission, as an Author, Listener, Speaker and Developer to help people thrive in one of the harshest, and potentially impactful, working environments: software system engineering. As an expert in Chaos Engineering, Resilience Engineering, Security and Software Architecture, Russ helps people navigate the complicated and complex to succeed through his books, mentorship, open source contributions, talks, courses and his daily work. Russ aims to help people that are responsible for building and running some of today’s most critical software-based systems to not just survive but thrive (with style).
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