Shipping products, evolving platforms
Engineering organizations that build complex, integrated systems often use project centric structures.
Projects focus on delivering complete solutions within a defined scope.
Platform engineering follows a different focus: It emphasizes shared capabilities, long term development, and continuous releases across technical domains.
Differences between these approaches often appear less in tools or architecture and more in organizational structures and ways of working.
This contribution looks at the different perspectives behind project and platform centric development.
Conway’s Law is used as a guiding viewpoint:
When systems reflect the communication structures of the organizations that create them, project oriented setups often lead to tightly coupled, scope focused solutions.
Platform oriented development, on the other hand, depends on stable ownership, clear interfaces, and continuity beyond individual deliveries.
The talk explores where projects and platforms can be aligned and where their goals begin to differ.
It discusses why platforms are not well suited to being treated as temporary project results.
It also addresses why releases should be understood as changes to the platform, even when they originate from project needs.
Johannes Krautkremer holds a masters degree in Electrical Engineering and worked as a development engineer on RADAR systems for both military and automotive applications, as well as embedded system designer for medical appliances, covering the full development lifecycle from system design and hardware/software implementation to testing.
This experience led to a strong conviction that clear system definition and work-scope planning are essential for meaningful implementation.
Since 2018, he has worked as a consultant in Requirements Engineering and Model-Based Systems Engineering, initially at a big automotive company and since 2022 at :em engineering methods AG.
In recent years, his focus has shifted toward organizational change, with a particular emphasis on the psychological and human aspects of transformation.
She holds a PhD in Automation and Robotics Engineering and has built her career around Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), primarily within regulated industries such as rail and, more recently, the elevator sector.
Over the past two years, she has been working at Belimo Automation AG, where she is responsible for Product Architectures and the development and application of MBSE methodologies.
Alba’s interests extend beyond classical MBSE toward Model-Based Product Line Engineering (MBPLE), with a strong focus on enabling the transition from project-oriented organizations to platform-based approaches. She is particularly passionate about supporting and observing the organizational and process transformations required to successfully introduce these paradigms in industrial environments.