Platform Engineering Needs a Product Management Mindset

Key Takeaways

1. Platform engineering is the intersection of three core practices: developer experience, product management mindset, and the traditional DevOps mindset.
2. Successful platform engineering requires avoiding common product management failure modes, such as:
   • Assuming user needs
   • Losing sight of business outcomes
   • Focusing on a single persona
   • Trying to build everything at once
3. Building a successful platform engineering practice involves:
   • Aligning automation and self-service with key business outcomes
   • Collaborating closely with cross-functional partners (e.g., SRE, security, cloud infrastructure)
   • Considering three main personas: developers, central teams, and engineering leadership
   • Delivering incremental value and not thinking of the platform as a single, monolithic entity
4. Measuring the success of platform engineering should be tied to key business outcomes, such as:
   • Improving time to market
   • Enhancing customer experience
   • Increasing cost and efficiency
5. An internal developer portal can serve as the foundation for platform engineering, providing visibility, baselines, and self-service workflows.

Product Management Mindset for Platform Engineering

1. Understanding the Goal of Product Management

   • The goal of product management is to solve customer needs in service of key business outcomes.

2. Aligning with Business Outcomes

   • The key business outcomes that platform engineering should focus on are:
     • Innovation and time to market
     • Quality and customer experience
     • Cost and efficiency

3. Achieving Engineering Excellence

   • Engineering excellence can be broken down into areas such as ownership and accountability, reliability, security, standardization, and more.
   • Platform engineering enables these engineering excellence initiatives by providing the foundational capabilities.

4. Failure Modes of Product Management

   • Assuming user needs
   • Losing sight of business outcomes
   • Focusing on a single persona
   • Trying to build everything at once

Implementing Platform Engineering as a Product

1. Automation and Self-Service

   • Align automation and self-service with the key business outcomes you're trying to solve.
   • Work closely with cross-functional partners (e.g., SRE, security, cloud infrastructure) to ensure the platform meets their needs.

2. Considering Personas

   • Identify and address the needs of three main personas: developers, central teams, and engineering leadership.

3. Delivering Incremental Value

   • Don't try to build the entire platform at once; deliver incremental value and improvements.
   • Think of the platform as a collection of best-of-breed capabilities, not a single monolithic entity.

Measuring Success

1. Tying to Business Outcomes

   • Measure the platform's success by its impact on key business outcomes, such as time to market, customer experience, and cost/efficiency.
   • Translate these business outcomes into specific engineering metrics (e.g., PR cycle time, CI/CD speed, developer productivity).

2. Leveraging Internal Developer Portals

   • An internal developer portal can serve as the foundation for platform engineering, providing visibility, baselines, and self-service workflows.

Conclusion

• Platform engineering is a complex endeavor, but adopting a product management mindset can help build a better, more effective platform.
• The internal developer portal is a crucial component of the platform engineering foundation.