How do internal engineering platforms shape team culture and software delivery? Audun Fauchald Strand, Director of Platform and Infrastructure at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), explores this question ahead of his session at the Data 2030 Summit.
Building a platform isn’t a tech problem; it’s a socio-technical one. That insight sits at the heart of our conversation with NAV’s Director of Platform and Infrastructure, Audun Fauchald Strand.
Having transitioned from the developer frontlines, where he helped build critical pandemic response solutions, to leading the organization’s platform evolution, Strand brings a clear perspective on both sides of engineering: the pull of hands-on coding and the high-leverage challenge of systemic leadership.
Ahead of his session at the Data 2030 Summit on how platforms shape organizational culture, this interview looks at what it takes to build systems engineers actually want to use. Below, Strand shares how replacing slow control gates with optional “golden paths” preserves team autonomy, and why bringing DevOps and continuous delivery into the data space is the next major step.
In your session at the upcoming Data 2030 Summit, you will be looking at how platforms shape culture. What was the main friction developers were running into that made a platform approach essential in the first place?
My main experiences have been on the application side. When we started the platform journey, we had an ops team handling deployment and such, whilst the developers made the applications. We wanted to reduce handovers, and create a stronger feedback loop between the developers and the code running in production, to increase quality. 
There were multiple control gates, for instance jira tickets, needed before a deployment. Also some systems had a separate set of people actually deploying the change, so there was a handover.
One of the key takeaways in your session is ‘It’s about people, not technology’. Where do organizations go wrong when they treat architecture as purely a tech problem, and how do you build a platform teams actually want to use rather than bypass?
Most systems are socio-technical. The team structure is the architecture. So you have to make sure these align. Also a good technology culture needs good tooling, with self service platforms, and product thinking. Building that into the platforms shaped the culture and the architecture.
How do you balance team autonomy with shared architectural standards, especially when forced code reuse starts causing more friction than it solves?
By building a golden path, and making it easy for the teams to make the right decision, you shape the architecture when you shape the Golden path. By making the Golden path optional you honor the autonomy, whilst at the same time standardizing.
We didn’t really worry about the fragmentation. It’s impossible to verify and check every team’s technological choices. The responsibilities are with the teams, and if they want to do something else they can. But the golden path was golden enough for the teams to choose that.
Your talk explores how application platform patterns apply to the data space. Where do you see the biggest overlap between software delivery and data platforms?
First of all they have to cooperate. The data often start in the application space, before going to the analytical space. I also think that a lot of the innovations in the application development in the last 10-15 years, like continuous delivery and DevOps are things that the data space can learn from.
What does applying DevOps, continuous delivery, or product thinking actually look like when building data platforms in practice?
That is the interesting question. It’s still a bit unclear, but aiming for self service, automated processes and working towards the dora metrics are a good start.
For engineers stepping into leadership or teams building their first platform: what’s the advice you’d offer?
Think about your users. When you build platforms the users are the other teams. Make sure you solve their problems.
Want to go deeper than this interview? Join Audun Fauchald Strand at the Data 2030 Summit to see how eliminating control gates and standardizing self-service platform patterns can reshape your engineering culture. Learn how to bring these exact DevOps and product-thinking principles into the data space: straight from the leaders who built it. Reserve your spot today to transform how your organization delivers software and data!
