You are creating waste if your platform teams do not have strong product managers.
I was pleasantly surprised to have one article (Product Discovery in Platform Teams) featured in the UXDX newsletter under the section of Continuous Discovery. It was also, coincidentally, the PlatformCon 2023, where many folks presented their contribution to the Platform Engineering community. Yet, I would have loved to see more heads of product, CTOs, and VCs in the audience.
The dark side of the week is that we keep seeing a lot of feedback and questions from platform teams struggling with their day-to-day, mainly platform engineers needing product managers, drowning with all requests they get. (i.e. imagine the situation one business-value product team just requested to integrate a new vendor that provides better observability to their engineers, so they can better monitor their product’s performance).
- Do they need that?
- What problems do they solve with this?
- What are the risks associated with this?
- What is the impact of this on the business?
- How this contributes to other parts of the company?
The questions go on and on. Yet, most of the time, the solution is built and barely used. It creates product waste beside the resources, time, and all the other factors associated with product development.
If you are familiar with product discovery, these questions are standard. But for many platform teams, they are not. And most executives do not see the need to adopt platform-as-a-product.
Product management is a skill that is a culmination of experience and education, not something that anyone can just pick up. Do not expect this to come for free just because you have skilled infrastructure specialists.
ThoughtWorks
What is necessary to shift the mentality of building software by request to strong product platform teams?
I will call it—what happens here is the old way of working of white-collar vs blue-collar workers. Most platform teams work following specs written by someone else, in projects that start and finish, with no understanding of their customers, strategic impact, or any other consideration. They function as an outsourced function of the business.
Ok, but you can not just bring a PM to change everything from one day to the next. What if this aligns differently from how tech and product execs think of platform teams?
These are symptoms of organisations with executives not seeing the importance of treating the platform as a product:
- Your team’s work is seen as a one-and-done activity
- How to demonstrate your product’s value.
- Drowning in hundreds of requests from other internal teams.
- Not knowing what are the main priorities of your team.
- Knowing what is your team’s contribution to the business.
The move to treat your platform as a product is a challenging quest. But, if you are up to it, you can do it.
How to change to Platforms as a product
1) Consider what problems your CTO or Head of Product needs and wants to solve. Do not just put the issues your platform team is facing as the first thing in the conversation; instead, try to see the world through the sight of your managers.
- What are their goals?
- What do they do to succeed?
- What is important to them?
- What does success look like for them?
Once you have understood and interiorised the answer to these questions, you need to 2) match bringing the platform as a product with your execs and business goals.
- Will treating the platform as a product accelerate time to value?
- Will having the platform as a product improve the platform’s health and increase the business value of other product teams?
- Will the platform reduce the costs associated with platform development?
- Will the platform as a product create transparency between the platform and business outcomes? (you should make sure to expose how platform PMs can measure success in platform teams)
Now that you’ve mapped platform-as-a-product’s benefits vs execs and business goals, you should be able to 3) validate how well platform-as-a-product is with colleagues. You can start by creating internal awareness and talking to peers about it.
- What do other PMs think about it?
- How do your Infrastructure teams feel about it?
- Do they see how platform as a product helps them out?
- How excited are they about this? Do they want to try it out?
You can speak about it to respected tech and product leaders in your company, making it easier for you to make the pitch.
4) Reach out to the Platform Engineering community. Try discovering what companies treat the platform as a product or are in the process.
5) Your goal should be to start a trial. Define what success look like for this trial or proof of concept. How do you know if having a platform as a product was such a good idea? Start small to validate your assumptions. I suggest trying product management in a less mission-critical platform team.
If you are not a PM, reach out to one that can be onboard for the time you want your trial to run. Usually, PMs are busy, but they also are learning animals, so they would love to learn how to manage a platform as a product. Do not try this alone.
If you are a PM, you should involve your EM or tech lead from the beginning and align on the goals of this trial and how you want to measure its success. (If your team has enough autonomy, you can start here and avoid the previous steps. Just go ahead)
In any case, there needs to be a product manager.
6) Make the pitch. Changes can be scary, but you are ready to run your trial. It would help if you understood in what situation your execs can respond better to suggestions and new ideas.
- Start with a problem statement (at the business level)
- Explain, in short, how a platform as a product can solve it
- Crisply present your trial and how you will know what success looks like
If you do not get their buy-in, consider what you missed that could have helped you succeed. But, if you get their buy-in, you should do everything to either achieve your goals or collect enough learnings for the organisation.
Most importantly, you should learn what is the best way of managing and discover better ways of improving your platform. It is up to you.
Robiert Luque 