> 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.
Somewhat true. Platform teams have to be engineering & product led. I run a platform team and we work very closely with our customers to understand what problems they are facing and identify platform level solutions for those problems. But we are still hampered by the team not using the platform for their everyday work, reducing the empathy they have towards its papercuts. However, being purely product focused can lead you astray of your users. Our PMs invent capabilities that no one really asked for ignoring the rather large backlog of capabilities that they already need. That's also bad.
The problem with every platform team is that, impact is hard to nail down. Does X using your platform Y to generate revenue mean your platform Y has indirect impact same as X? Most companies don't think so and end up destaffing their platform teams. Until, the destaffing ends up in much more inefficiency because everyone is inventing their own crooked wheel, spending time on the same capabilities and detracting from product development.
I suppose there's the "better type of horse" issue. Maybe the engineering side can come up with something that users wouldn't think to ask for, or whose benefits aren't obvious until it's actually up and running.
Not really. Not unless your PM is also an extremely deep technology person. Here is a simple example from our current debate: should we build the resiliency capability that hurts multiple customers and who have asked for it because it reduces their toil or the AI feature that nobody has asked for that our PM wants? The AI "feature" is consuming 6 engineers, is behind schedule and turns out to be significantly more complicated than anticipated and won't hit the end of year timeline. We don't know what uptake is going to be like. The resiliency feature could be shipped in 2 months and cut human interventions >70% of the time. Customers are already lined up waiting for it.
One argument is that the AI "feature" is forward looking and can bring more customers into the platform. Agreed. And then what? They are also stuck on the resiliency feature right?
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.
oldnewthing · · focus · HN ↗
The problem with every platform team is that, impact is hard to nail down. Does X using your platform Y to generate revenue mean your platform Y has indirect impact same as X? Most companies don't think so and end up destaffing their platform teams. Until, the destaffing ends up in much more inefficiency because everyone is inventing their own crooked wheel, spending time on the same capabilities and detracting from product development.
dominotw · · focus · HN ↗
No they have to be product led.
> Our PMs invent capabilities
this is not a good reason for it to be not.
nsxwolf · · focus · HN ↗
quietbritishjim · · focus · HN ↗
sharts · · focus · HN ↗
oldnewthing · · focus · HN ↗
One argument is that the AI "feature" is forward looking and can bring more customers into the platform. Agreed. And then what? They are also stuck on the resiliency feature right?