Platform engineers as product managers: Boost your team’s productivity (DOP102)

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.

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