Platform as a Product: Beyond the Buzzword

Many engineering organizations build platforms that nobody uses. The reason is simple: they build what they think developers need, rather than treating them as customers.

From Project to Product

A project has a start and an end. A product has a lifecycle and users.

• User Research: Interview your developers. What are their pain points?
• Adoption over Mandate: If the platform is good, developers will choose it. Mandating a bad platform creates shadow IT.
• Roadmap: Communicate what’s coming. Manage expectations like a real SaaS product.

Key Metrics for Platform Products

Stop measuring "number of features". Start measuring:

• Time to First Hello World: How long for a new hire to deploy?
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Do your developers actually like the tools?
• Self-service Rate: Percentage of operations done without a ticket.

How to avoid building shelfware

Two patterns help a lot:

1. Design around journeys, not tools. “Create service”, “deploy safely”, “debug production” are products; Kubernetes and Terraform are implementation details.
2. Make the paved road cheaper than the alternative. If the fastest path is manual, teams will keep doing manual.

Common pitfalls

• Feature factory thinking: shipping features without measuring adoption.
• No deprecation story: platforms rot when old templates and pipelines live forever.
• Optimizing for edge cases first: start with the mainstream service type and expand.

A simple first month plan

1. Pick one flagship golden path and onboard 2–3 pilot teams.
2. Measure time to first deploy and the top friction points.
3. Publish a short roadmap and iterate weekly.

What to ship first (to build trust)

Platforms win adoption when they remove pain quickly. A pragmatic first wave is:

• 1–2 golden paths for high-frequency services (web API, batch job, data pipeline)
• a clear contract: templates, CI/CD, security defaults, and operational basics (SLOs, dashboards)
• a lightweight support + feedback loop (office hours, docs, changelog)

The minimum operating model

Treat the platform like a product team:

• a single prioritized backlog (not a ticket queue)
• explicit ownership (PM/Tech Lead/Engineers + security/SRE partners)
• versioning/deprecation rules so teams can upgrade safely

Conclusion

Treating your platform as a product is the only way to ensure long-term ROI. It turns the platform team from a bottleneck into an enabler.