1. Mission Statement

Template: The Platform Team exists to [accelerate product team velocity / reduce operational toil / standardize infrastructure] by providing [shared tooling / infrastructure services / developer experience improvements] that enable product teams to [ship faster / focus on customer value / scale reliably].

Example: The Platform Team accelerates product velocity by providing self-service infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling that enables product teams to deploy code to production in under 15 minutes with confidence.

2. Scope: What We Own

Define the boundaries of the platform team's responsibilities:

Core Infrastructure: Kubernetes clusters, networking, load balancing, DNS, secrets management
CI/CD: Build pipelines, deployment automation, rollback tooling, blue-green/canary deployment frameworks
Observability: Logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting infrastructure (not application-specific alerts)
Developer Experience: Local development environments, service templates, documentation, onboarding automation
Security & Compliance: Identity/access management, secrets rotation, audit logging, vulnerability scanning
Data Platform (optional): Data pipelines, data warehouse, analytics tooling

        What We Don't Own: Application code, product roadmaps, product-specific infrastructure (owned by product teams), business logic, customer-facing features.
      

3. Who We Serve

Our primary customers are:

Product Engineering Teams: Enable them to build, deploy, and operate services with minimal friction
New Hires: Reduce time-to-first-commit from weeks to days
Security & Compliance: Provide consistent controls and audit trails
Executive Leadership: Demonstrate ROI through velocity metrics and cost optimization

4. Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Clear expectations for platform service availability and responsiveness:

Uptime SLAs

Critical Services (CI/CD, Auth, Secrets): 99.9% uptime (< 43 minutes downtime per month)
Standard Services (Logging, Metrics): 99.5% uptime (< 3.6 hours downtime per month)

Support Response SLAs

P0 (Production Down): < 30 minutes response, < 4 hours resolution
P1 (Degraded Service): < 2 hours response, < 1 business day resolution
P2 (Feature Request/Bug): < 1 business day response, roadmap estimate within 1 week

Feature Request SLA

Triaged and prioritized within 1 week
Delivery estimate or "not on roadmap" decision within 2 weeks
Quarterly roadmap published with committed deliverables

5. First 90-Day Priorities

Goal: Deliver quick wins and establish credibility with product teams.

Weeks 1–2: Discovery

Survey product teams: What infrastructure work slows you down?
Identify top 3 pain points (e.g., slow CI/CD, lack of observability, complex deployment process)
Select 1–2 quick wins that can be delivered in < 2 weeks

Weeks 3–6: Quick Wins

Ship at least one capability that 2+ product teams adopt (e.g., service template with CI/CD pre-configured)
Establish weekly office hours for platform support
Publish 6-month roadmap with themes and quarterly OKRs

Weeks 7–12: Scale and Measure

Deliver 1–2 major capabilities (e.g., standardized observability stack, self-service deployment pipelines)
Measure adoption: % of product teams using platform services
Collect feedback via NPS or quarterly survey
Report metrics to exec team: adoption rate, time saved, developer satisfaction

6. Success Metrics (90-Day & Ongoing)

90-Day Metrics

Adoption: 50% of product teams using at least one platform service by end of Q1
Time-to-First-Deploy: Reduce from 10 days to 5 days for new services
Satisfaction: Platform NPS > 30 by end of Q1 (measure via quarterly survey)

Ongoing Metrics (Quarterly)

Adoption Rate: % of product teams actively using platform services (target: 80%+ by Q2)
Velocity Impact: Deploy frequency (target: 10+ deploys/day), PR cycle time (target: < 4 hours)
Cost Efficiency: Infrastructure cost per service (should stabilize or decrease as platform scales)
Incident Reduction: Platform-related incidents (target: < 2 per quarter)
Developer Satisfaction: Platform NPS (target: > 50 by Q4)

7. Governance and Decision-Making

Roadmap Prioritization

Input: Product team surveys, exec priorities, security/compliance requirements
Decision Forum: Platform team lead + CTO/VP Eng + product team representatives (monthly)
Criteria: Impact (# teams affected), urgency, alignment with company OKRs

Escalation Path

Level 1: Platform team lead
Level 2: CTO/VP Eng (for priority conflicts, resourcing)
Level 3: Exec team (for major architectural decisions or funding changes)

8. Team Structure and Roles

Core Roles

Platform Team Lead: Sets roadmap, interfaces with exec team and product teams, owns delivery
Platform Engineers (2–5): Build and maintain platform services, on-call rotation for critical services
Developer Experience Engineer (optional): Focuses on tooling, documentation, onboarding automation
SRE/Infrastructure Engineer (optional): Focuses on reliability, monitoring, incident response

Extended Team

Product Team Liaisons: One engineer from each product team who provides feedback and helps drive adoption
Security/Compliance Partner: Ensures platform meets security and compliance requirements

9. Communication Cadence

Weekly Office Hours: Product teams can drop in for support, questions, or feature discussions
Bi-Weekly Sprint Demos: Show progress to product teams and exec leadership
Monthly Roadmap Review: Review priorities with CTO/VP Eng and product team leads
Quarterly Business Review: Report on adoption, metrics, ROI, and next quarter's priorities to exec team

10. Budget and Resourcing

Initial Budget (Example)

Headcount: 3–5 platform engineers (fully loaded cost: $600K–$1M annually)
Infrastructure: Cloud costs, tooling licenses (e.g., CI/CD, observability SaaS) — estimate $10K–$50K/month depending on scale
Training/Conferences: $10K/year for team to stay current on platform engineering best practices

ROI Justification

If platform saves each of 10 product engineers 5 hours/week (by eliminating undifferentiated infra work), that's 2,500 hours/year = 1.25 FTE reclaimed for product work
At $150K fully loaded cost per engineer, that's $187K in reclaimed value annually
Platform team cost: ~$800K. Break-even if platform saves 5.3 FTE-equivalent hours across the org, or ~10 engineers saving 10 hours/week

Platform Team Charter Template