> Platform teams are engineering-led rather than product-led. There is almost never a product manager handing you a roadmap, no revenue line to follow, and no market to lose.
It's precisely because of this framing and mentality that platform teams don't actually serve people well and are usually highly dysfunctional towers of people inventing work.
The fix for having no market is to act like the teams you serve could leave. This whole article lists signals, and none of them is that. Being captive does not mean the users or internal teams don't have other options and don't notice. Being product-led means caring about your users. A platform teams should be product-led, not engineering-led in that very narrow meaning. Otherwise you invent work as this article so wonderfully exposes.
> It's precisely because of this framing and mentality that platform teams don't actually serve people
I agree. When I was on the platform team (despite it not being called that at the time) our thinking was that feature developers were our customers. And our production was the tools they used. This meant not necessarily aligning production being only what was in production for customers of the company, but also in any service we provided to developers. This mentality had to be instilled into the team, and we had to remind people of this frequently, but it worked well.
dabedee · · focus · HN ↗
It's precisely because of this framing and mentality that platform teams don't actually serve people well and are usually highly dysfunctional towers of people inventing work.
The fix for having no market is to act like the teams you serve could leave. This whole article lists signals, and none of them is that. Being captive does not mean the users or internal teams don't have other options and don't notice. Being product-led means caring about your users. A platform teams should be product-led, not engineering-led in that very narrow meaning. Otherwise you invent work as this article so wonderfully exposes.
jasonlotito · · focus · HN ↗
I agree. When I was on the platform team (despite it not being called that at the time) our thinking was that feature developers were our customers. And our production was the tools they used. This meant not necessarily aligning production being only what was in production for customers of the company, but also in any service we provided to developers. This mentality had to be instilled into the team, and we had to remind people of this frequently, but it worked well.