What Problems Indicate the Need of Internal Platform Product Management?

Jan 19, 2023

What are the responsibilities of a product manager for internal products? When have internal dev tool PMs been seen as highly valued? Ultimately, why have PMs for internal development platforms? This quote comes to mind:

"It's important to observe what happens without platform teams."

- Adam Rogal, DoorDash

I spoke with several platform engineering leaders, watched interviews, and read countless articles to determine the pains that applying a PM soothed.

Problem: Dev Tool/Platform Teams are resource-constrained and "tread water"

Danny Thomas from Netflix says that after getting PMs, his team was able to focus on the most impactful problems. Danny works on a team of 4 engineers, so there's always more to do than there are people to do it. After introducing PMs at Netflix, the team better understood how to leverage themselves for the best impact.

A lack of consistent prioritization disperses effort. While a team may be busy and engaged, nothing new gets produced. The backlog keeps growing. The team feels a lack of "rhythm."

There is a common theme from multiple sources of teams "treading water." Besides lack of focus, releasing products that get limited adoption also creates the state of treading water.

Platform product teams find momentum from the feedback gathered from users using their products. If engineering teams aren't adopting the work, there's no feedback to drive focus, and the team will eventually drift.

Problem: The "local optimization" problem

As Platform organizations scale, a level of autonomy and independence is often still given to the teams. However, without effective product management, many platform teams optimize specifically for their problems, resulting in disjointed platform-level product experiences for the users.

After introducing PMs, many teams report more standardized KPIs at the Platform level that aligns local domain data and initiatives with the entire team. Organizations with the most successful relationships with product management occur when a PM's research aids in shaping priorities across multiple groups, referred to as "explicitly shared user-first goals."

Problem: Management doesn't "get" the value of the developer tools

A problem at Platform teams at one point in their maturity or another is describing the value, or impact, they have on the business or at least the engineering teams.

The teams that report this solved by PMs either have a PM skilled in dealing with incomplete data but can still produce visualizations or a group formed to aid PMs in defining and visualizing data.

The common thread is visualization. Nothing communicates like a picture, and PMs that educate management about impact visualize data. It's less about how perfectly measured the data is as well – so long as management can see a trend.

Big companies, like LinkedIn or Google, have teams to gather insights about developer productivity improvements using Platform products. Other companies provide a single data scientist as a roaming resource. Finally, other companies rely on product leadership to coach PMs to create graphs in spreadsheets.

Whatever the approach, if reliable data isn't collected and visualized, there is almost always tension between management and Platform as the team grows.

What are the most commonly beneficial PM Responsibilities?

Feeding product requirements or goals at a pace consistent with the team's "flow."
Gaining adoption and feedback of released work at a pace that facilitates the team's "flow."
Aligning the team's understanding of success to shared goals and standard measures – often, a Platform team's services integrate into a holistic product offered to engineers.
Gathering data and communicating the progress of outcomes via visualizations.
Taken together, we have a flywheel of feedback → goals + requirements → release → adopt → visualize.

Further Reading + Resources

Not an exhaustive list of references, but many that informed the article and are great jump points to learn more:

Internal Developer Platforms as Products

Discussion about this post