alt Hacker News> Platform teams are engineering-led rather than product-led. There is almost never a product manager handing you a roadmap, no revenue line to follow, and no market to lose.
It's precisely because of this framing and mentality that platform teams don't actually serve people well and are usually highly dysfunctional towers of people inventing work.
The fix for having no market is to act like the teams you serve could leave. This whole article lists signals, and none of them is that. Being captive does not mean the users or internal teams don't have other options and don't notice. Being product-led means caring about your users. A platform teams should be product-led, not engineering-led in that very narrow meaning. Otherwise you invent work as this article so wonderfully exposes.
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You'd be surprised how VPs love to insert PMs. A famous game platform company, for instance, had two PMs for their storage team, one PM for their data team, one PM for the compute team, one PM for their dev tools team, if I remember correctly (the numbers could be larger, but won't be smaller)
I've led a number of platform teams over the past decade and we've always treated it like a product with internal and external customers.
> Being product-led means caring about your users. A platform teams should be product-led, not engineering-led in that very narrow meaning.
And where do product people get ideas for new features? If you're Microsoft you look at what successful competitors are doing. If you're anyone else you look at customer pain points, exactly as described in the article.
Maybe at large orgs. I’ve never found a platform/engineering led teams to engage in work that didn’t amplify the work of other teams.
It mentions toil and postmortems, which are pretty relevant to the teams you work with.
You're assuming product people don't 'invent' work, which is faaaar from true. The more technical the area, the more nonsense 'product' generates, that engineering then has to either redo, clean up or fight. The 'product' people on 'product-led' teams also generally own the internal comms and marketing (internal) side of things, which often has the effect of silencing engineering (and many other negative side effects). (Not always but often imo)
Engineers should understand their customers and their product (whether internal or external), should understand their metrics, and should be able to make intelligent, informed decisions. Sticking a non-technical 'product' (aka marketing) person into the mix is generally net-negative imo.