Today’s post is a follow up from yesterday’s post – Why Internal Teams Need Product Thinking. Today I will cover what it looks like when you apply product thinking pillars to platform teams.

1. Developer Experience (DevEx) = Customer Experience (CX)

In the external product world, friction kills conversion rates. In the internal platform world, friction kills velocity.

If your internal API has confusing error messages, your “customer” wastes hours debugging. If your deployment process requires twelve manual steps, your “customer” ships less frequently.

Platform teams need to obsess over Developer Experience (DevEx) the same way consumer product managers obsess over UX.

• Actionable Shift: Stop designing tools based on how the infrastructure works. Start designing them based on how developers want to work. Conduct user research. Watch a new hire try to deploy their first service using your tools. Where do they stumble? That friction point is your new product roadmap item.

2. The Roadmap: Knowing What to Expect, and When

Nothing erodes trust faster than surprise. Yet, many platform teams operate as black boxes. They work secretly on a massive infrastructure upgrade for six months and then drop it on the organization, disrupting everyone’s workflow.

A product requires a roadmap. Your internal customers need to know what features are coming, what technical debt is being addressed, and critically, when they will be impacted.

• Actionable Shift: Publish a quarterly roadmap for your platform. Are you deprecating a legacy CI system in Q3? Tell them in Q1. Are you releasing a new self-service database portal in Q2? Hype it up. Give your customers the visibility they need to plan their own roadmaps against yours.

3. Communication, Migration, and the “Broadcasting” Duty

You cannot just build it and hope they will come. Product management involves marketing and change management.

When you release a breaking change to an internal API, you don’t just send an email at 5:00 PM on a Friday saying, “It’s changed, deal with it.” A product mindset requires:

• Broadcasting Changes: Use multiple channels (Slack, email, town halls) to announce upcoming changes well in advance.
• Migration Strategies: Don’t just break things; provide a paved path to the new version. Write scripts to automate the migration. Offer “office hours” to help teams upgrade.
• Deprecation Policies: Establish clear timelines for supporting older versions of your tools, just like public software vendors do.

4. Support and Documentation are Features, Not Chores

In the old model, documentation is the last thing written (if at all), and support is handled grudgingly via JIRA tickets.

In the product model, documentation is part of the user interface. If a developer needs to ask a human how to use your tool, your product has failed a usability test.

Your “Customer Operations” is your DevOps/SRE support function. How you handle an outage or a blocked deployment defines your product’s brand reputation internally.

• Actionable Shift: Invest in golden paths, step-by-step, foolproof guides for common tasks (e.g., “How to spin up a new microservice in under 10 minutes”). Treat support interactions not as annoyances, but as vital user feedback loops pointing to product deficiencies.

The Outcome: Empathy and Velocity

Moving from a utility provider mindset to a product mindset is difficult. It requires platform engineers to develop new muscles – empathy, communication, and user research. It might even require hiring actual Product Managers specifically for platform teams.

But the payoff is massive.

When platform teams treat their work as a product, friction decreases. Trust increases. The us vs. them wall starts to crumble. And most importantly, the entire organization moves faster, because the foundation they are building upon is designed to accelerate them, not slow them down.