Do you need a platform team?

Some companies have a team that's responsible for owning and maintaining code, infrastructure, and processes that are adopted by other teams to work on micro-frontends. Common responsibilities include:

• Create and maintain a CI/CD pipeline that can be used with repositories containing micro-frontends. Build and test code changes, and release them in multiple environments.

• Create and maintain observability-related tools such as shared dashboards, alerting mechanisms, and systems to react to issues.

• Create and maintain shared libraries for event handling, shared-service consumption, and third-party dependencies.

• Create and maintain tools that continuously monitor nonfunctional qualities such as performance, security, and reliability of the system.

• Create and maintain design systems.

• Create, maintain, and support the application shell for the micro-frontend system.

Depending on the scale of the project, you can manage these responsibilities by using one of the following approaches:

• Create a dedicated platform team whose only responsibility is to work on shared tools.

• Create a group composed of members from multiple teams. Group members split their time between working on micro-frontends and working on shared tooling. This is also known as a tiger team.

While the tiger-team approach is an effective way to stay customer focused, a tiger team often evolves into a platform team if the project gains traction and responsibilities. For both platform teams and tiger teams, the most successful companies working on micro-frontends form these teams so that multiple people with multiple backgrounds and skills can contribute. Team members might include backend engineers, frontend engineers, user experience (UX) designers, and technical product managers. This diversity pushes people to continuously engage in healthy debates and design with simplicity in mind.