This article argues that internal platform teams should adopt a product-centric mindset to ensure their platforms are actually used and valuable. It highlights common pitfalls when platform teams focus solely on technical delivery without considering user needs, adoption strategies, and intentional friction. The core idea is that internal platforms are structurally products and require product management principles for successful system design and implementation within an organization.
Read original on The New StackMany internal platform teams find their technically sound solutions bypassed or underutilized by the wider engineering organization. The root cause often isn't a technical failing, but rather a lack of product thinking. This article emphasizes that internal platforms, like external products, have users with diverse needs, alternative solutions (sanctioned or not), and adoption curves that require strategic management. Treating a platform as a product fundamentally changes the design approach, moving from merely building capabilities to solving real problems for specific user segments.
A common mistake is designing platforms for a generic 'developer' persona. The article points out that different engineering teams (e.g., maintaining legacy services, running ML pipelines, managing regulated deployments) have vastly different constraints and needs. Optimizing for an abstract user leads to compromises that satisfy no one particularly well. Instead, platform teams should use detailed personas as a forcing function, asking: 'Who is this built for first? Whose workflow is optimized, and who absorbs the trade-off?' This approach ensures the platform addresses concrete pain points for a defined audience, increasing its likelihood of adoption and advocacy.
Friction as a Design Choice
Not all friction is bad. Load-bearing friction can be an intentional design choice to slow down high-risk changes, enforce policy boundaries, or surface critical information (e.g., cost, security implications) at the right moment. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary friction while preserving or introducing beneficial friction points.
Platform design often defaults to minimizing all friction. However, some friction is 'load-bearing' and serves a critical purpose in a system, such as enforcing security policies or making costs visible. Product-minded platform teams regularly question why a constraint exists and whether it still serves its purpose. Furthermore, explicit user feedback isn't the only signal. Behavioral signals—such as repeated questions about edge cases, custom scripts duplicating platform functionality, or policy exception clusters—provide invaluable diagnostic information that should drive platform iterations. Ignoring these 'silent' feedback loops can lead to building v2 of a product nobody used in the first place.
Traditional platform roadmaps often list technical outputs (e.g., 'new abstraction layer,' 'refactored auth flow'). A product-centric approach shifts this to focus on outcomes: 'What decision gets easier? What risk becomes harder to take accidentally? What costs become visible?' This outcome-driven mindset guides development towards measurable impact rather than just technical completion. Prioritizing based on behavioral telemetry—identifying where teams deviate from golden paths or where workflows stall—ensures that the platform evolves to solve actual user challenges, fostering organic adoption and long-term value.