Building a Technical Middle Platform From 0 to 1 - Organizational Structure

The middle platform architecture has received much attention in recent years, but due to the lack of a unified definition, different companies have different understandings of the middle platform. Recently, the Chiptronics technical team shared their experience and insights in building a technical middle platform from scratch, which is worth referring to. Regardless of the organizational structure adopted, its core goal is always to better serve talents and improve business efficiency. Therefore, in the process of promoting the middle platform, we always start from these two aspects, evaluate the impact of the existing architecture on efficiency, and explore how to optimize the organizational structure.

From the perspective of things, the organizational structure of the middle platform should focus on improving the reuse rate

1. Only one team is responsible for each task

The organizational structure of traditional Internet companies is usually designed based on business development. Every time a new business line is added, the organizational structure often needs to be rebuilt, which leads to the problem of duplicate construction. If a company has multiple business lines, there will usually be multiple DBA teams, operation and maintenance teams, and infrastructure teams. This means that the same work is handled by multiple teams within the company, and each team must independently manage talents and accumulate technology, which is very inefficient from the perspective of reuse rate. If the same work is centralized in one team, repeated tasks only need to be done once, which not only reduces unnecessary workload, but also brings together relevant talents and resources from the entire company, so that tasks can be completed more professionally, in-depth, and systematically.

2. Everything should be enterprise-grade

Having one team be responsible for everything means that the middle platform team needs to turn the work it is responsible for into an enterprise-level service. This reflects the balance between rights and obligations: when a team has exclusive responsibilities, it must assume the responsibility of providing services to the entire company. At present, Banyu's technical middle platform undertakes all basic services, and each task is designed as an enterprise-level service. For example, the alarm system is designed as an information distribution platform. Regardless of the front-end, back-end, operation and maintenance, or database, all alarm information that needs to be distributed will first be sent to this platform, which is responsible for distributing the alarm information to the corresponding person in charge.

From a human perspective, the middle office organizational structure should focus on improving communication efficiency

Conway's Law states that the communication structure of an organization directly affects the design of the system. The higher the communication efficiency, the more reasonable the system design. The core concept of the middle platform is to influence the company's system design by optimizing the communication efficiency of the organization.

Take the account platform as an example. Before the middle-officeization, each account-related service provided a series of APIs separately, which resulted in the business team that needed to use the account service having to connect and access with multiple service managers, resulting in inefficient communication. In fact, the process of each business team accessing the account service is similar. Therefore, the core goal of the middle-officeization is to integrate all account-related services into one team and abstract the access forms of multiple services and APIs into a unified account capability or service.

Chiptron Technology Middle Platform has previously provided APP push platforms, SMS push platforms, and WeChat push platforms, and is now developing in the direction of a "reach platform." This platform can automatically select the most appropriate reach method based on different business scenarios and user situations, and intelligently recommend different reach methods through feedback data to improve reach efficiency. This reflects the evolution from platformization to middle platformization - from providing basic capabilities to providing more powerful and intelligent product or service capabilities.

The evolution of the organizational structure of Chiptron Technologies

The above content introduces Chiptron's understanding of the organizational structure of the middle platform: the core of the middle platform is to improve the reuse rate of work and the communication efficiency of the organization, and at the same time provide strong product or service capabilities based on this. Next, we will explain the evolution of the organizational structure of Chiptron's technology middle platform under this principle.

The first stage is the infrastructure stage, which is the starting stage of the JiChuang technology middle platform. At that time, there was only a server infrastructure group, which was mainly responsible for basic services, microservice frameworks, and service governance. The DBA team also belonged to this group at that time.

The second stage is the platformization stage, when the Chiptron Technology Center was officially established. The server infrastructure team, DBA team, operation and maintenance R&D team, and Web, Android and iOS infrastructure teams were merged into the Chiptron Technology Center to promote the SRE culture. Each team gradually platformized the work that required manual management. Since the technology center includes the front-end and back-end infrastructure teams, the communication and collaboration efficiency is significantly improved.

The third stage is the stage of middle platformization, which is the stage that the Banji Chuangshu middle platform is currently in. Internally, the focus is on exploring the value between platforms; externally, the focus is on improving the R&D experience when using the business. To explore the value between platforms is to build a "platform on the platform" to improve the platform's ability to provide products and services by connecting the data and interfaces of multiple related platforms. At the same time, based on the R&D experience, some platforms with similar usage scenarios are integrated to provide a unified and simplified way of use. In addition, in order to optimize communication efficiency, along with the integration and adjustment of the platform, the internal organizational structure will also be optimized and adjusted accordingly.