Engineering leaders with mature platform teams: When you were establishing your platform engineering team structure, what insights/knowledge do you wish you had? What were the crucial factors that contributed to structuring your teams effectively?

Platform Engineering team is the first line of support, defense or experience for a Developer (qa/devops/Dev/product). Its key that engineering experience is given a priority to ensure there is good adoption, retention and advocacy of the platform.
Key factors: clear understanding of functionality/requirements, alignment to internal processes, delegation of users and access/control

Most important aspect is the teams willingness to adopt the central platform and if the platform can be made in a delegated model

One of the most important skills for the platforms team, was (surprisingly?) not a hard skill but s soft one - communication. We realized that in order to have a good platform team, which caters to the whole organization, we need to have people that can talk, understand, and be very service oriented to their colleagues (even if this sounds straight forward - it's not always the case).

In my previous experiences, while setting up platform teams I observed that they need to have a high degree of autonomy in order to be effective. However, they also need to be coordinated with other teams in the organization in order to ensure that they are working towards common goals.

The ability to experiment, innovate, perseverance, and patience are some of the most crucial factors according to me. A group of engineers from this team need to be dedicated to R&D purposes and shouldn't be held liable for deliveries, this gives them the ability to think and come up with solutions that more often than not proved to be effective for the deliveries.

 I want to clearly define the purpose and goals of your platform engineering team. Crucial factors included:  collaboration with product teams, cross functional expertise, clear ownership and accountability and the ability to scale.