Platform Engineering

Chapter 5. Platform as a Product

What’s an internal platform but an external platform being built in a hypoxic, lightless, dungheap of an environment?

Coda Hale

The idea of taking a product approach when building internal technology has become increasingly popular. Unfortunately, like with so many fads in the technology industry, many people who try to adopt this approach have no idea what it actually means, and end up taking the most literal interpretation to solving the problem—which, in the case of platform engineering, means they add a bunch of product managers to the team. While we agree that product managers are important, there’s a lot more to building a product-oriented platform organization than just hiring a few PMs. Because there are also some companies that actively resist having PMs for internal products, we’ve written this chapter so that it’s relevant regardless of whether you have a formal internal product management team.

This chapter is for anyone who wants to get their platform organization to adopt a product mindset and apply product management techniques. We start with a deep dive on culture, focusing on customers (or users—we apply the terms interchangeably to mean the people who actually consume your products to do their jobs), because step 1 is to understand the people you’re building these platforms for and how to interact with them as customers rather than stakeholders. Then, we talk about product discovery and evolution. With platforms, you will find ...