Platform as a Product - Building Trust, Not Just Tools

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a quiet shift take place in digital engineering - from building tools for teams to building platforms as products. It’s a shift that reflects something deeper than just architecture or automation. It reflects a maturing of our practice from control to enablement, from delivery to experience, from infrastructure to insight.

And yet, many platform efforts still miss the mark. Why? Because we treat them like infrastructure projects instead of user-centred products.

Let’s fix that.

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Why now?

Internal platforms have become central to modern software delivery - particularly in organisations grappling with scale, complexity, and regulatory pressure. We’ve all felt it:

• The overhead of stitching together fragmented tooling
• The inconsistency between teams
• The slow erosion of joy and autonomy due to cognitive overload!

Enter the Platform Team. A central capability that is the linchpin to deliver better value sooner, with a safer & happier approach. But building a successful platform isn’t just about spinning up shared tooling or bundling pipelines into reusable templates.

It’s about treating your internal platform like a product - with a clearly defined value proposition, customer personas (your engineering community), feedback loops, and success metrics.

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Where it goes wrong

I’ve worked with and led platform initiatives in various shapes - from enabling DevOps capabilities to building self-service environments. And patterns emerge.

Here are four common failure modes I’ve seen (and experienced):

1. “If we build it, they will come”

Too many platform teams fall into the trap of shipping what they think teams need - without doing the product discovery to find out what pain teams are actually experiencing. This leads to impressive tooling with poor adoption and even poorer sentiment. This is a well recognised dysfunction of value streams and a clear symptom that the platform isn't seen as a product

2. Governance disguised as enablement

A platform designed to ‘standardise’ often ends up restricting. Golden paths become cul-de-sacs. Engineers feel monitored... not supported. Governance isn’t wrong - but it must be enabling by default and opinionated, not prescriptive.

3. TicketOps: the silent platform killer

This one’s subtle but fatal. You know it’s happening when engineers need to raise a ticket to provision basic infrastructure, request access, or deploy to a new environment. Every action becomes an ask. This isn’t a platform - it’s a bottleneck!

If your platform team is spending more time triaging tickets than enabling teams, you’re not building a product - you’re running a helpdesk. Product platforms should enable self-service as the default and treat manual intervention as the exception.

4. No feedback loops

Once the platform is live, too many teams go quiet. No telemetry, no user interviews, no retrospective insight. They lack the data to iterate - and become a backlog-driven team rather than a product-driven one.

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What product thinking looks like

Product thinking changes the game. When you treat the platform like a product, your job isn’t just to “provide infrastructure.” It’s to deliver value.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• User research: Engage directly with delivery teams. Run discovery sessions. Understand pain points before writing code.
• Curated service catalogues: More than modules or templates - these are designed experiences, with documentation, sensible defaults, and clear onboarding.
• Prioritised roadmaps: Feature work is aligned to reducing friction, not showcasing technical complexity. Backlogs are informed by real data and validated needs.
• Internal marketing and advocacy: Even the best internal products need visibility. Champion adoption, communicate value, and celebrate platform wins.
• Telemetry and usage insight: Understand where engineers succeed, struggle, or circumvent. Instrumentation helps you steer, not just observe.

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Metrics that actually matter

In traditional infra teams, metrics focus on uptime and ticket resolution. In product-platform teams, we need to measure outcomes - not just operational performance.

Useful metrics include:

• Time to first deploy: How long does it take a team to go from zero to live?
• Adoption rate: What percentage of teams are using platform components - and do they choose to?
• Engineer satisfaction: Qualitative sentiment matters. Use pulse surveys, feedback loops, or open forums. Clearly define what a great DevEx looks like for your org.
• Cognitive load reduction: Are engineers able to focus on business problems, or are they spending time navigating the platform?

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A note on AI-readiness

Here’s a curveball: AI is reshaping how software is built, tested, deployed, and run. But AI won’t magically fix poor engineering environments. If anything, it amplifies the mess.

If your platform is clunky, inconsistent, or lacks self-service, AI won’t help - it’ll confuse. But if your platform is well-designed, discoverable, and tightly integrated, it becomes the perfect foundation for embedding AI capabilities - from Copilots to intelligent observability and automated incident response.

Platform-as-a-product is not only about improving delivery today - it’s about enabling what’s possible tomorrow.

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Where to Start: Your First Step into Internal Developer Platforms

Sooner or later though, rubber will need to hit the road as you move from theory to practical and with the desire to improve developer experience & unlock engineering flow - the best place to begin is by choosing between partnering with a pre-built platform provider or building a lightweight DIY solution.

Option 1: Start Simple with Port

Port offers a low-friction entry into internal developer platforms. It provides an opinionated developer portal, integrations with your existing pipelines, and a clean self-service UI - without requiring you to assemble everything yourself. Ideal if you want results quickly and aren’t ready to invest in building your own platform team just yet.

Other solutions exist such as Backstage (by Spotify), Compass (by Atlassian), Roadie, plus many more offer similar capabilities to get up and running quickly. Use these to help understand the context, domain and ultimately shape what good looks like for you.

Option 2: Build a DIY IDP with Proven Tools

If you’re keen to experiment though and learn by building, this minimal stack gives you everything you need to start small, test ideas, and grow as you go:

• Service Templates (Accelerate new service creation) - Cookiecutter + GitHub Templates provide simple CLI + Git-native templating
• Infra Provisioning (Declaratively manage environments) - Terraform is widely understood, declarative, good for infra teams
• CI/CD Pipelines (Automate build, test, deploy) - GitHub Actions is integrated, easy to debug and reusable
• Deployment Targets (Manage runtime platforms) - Azure App Services is easier and faster than Kubernetes for most apps
• Observability (Monitor system health and performance) - Grafana + Prometheus + Loki provide an easy container-based setup with full-stack visibility
• Developer Portal (Central entry point for dev workflows) - Lightweight Blazor or React SPA with simple UI over GitHub APIs, Terraform triggers & dashboards provide a minimal v1

This stack is intentionally simple but effective is a good first IDP setup - enough to prove value quickly, yet flexible to evolve into a robust platform practice over time. Start with one service, one environment, and one golden path. Then iterate.

What You Can Swap Later (When You Scale).

• Complex Orchestration - Kubernetes + ArgoCD
• Developer Self-Service Workflows - Backstage or Port
• Dynamic Infra + Policies - Crossplane or Pulumi
• Service Ownership Visibility - Cortex, OpsLevel, or Scorecards

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Final thoughts

Ultimately, a platform is successful not because of the tools it offers, but because of the confidence it instils.

Confidence to ship quickly. Confidence to recover safely. Confidence to focus on customer outcomes, not tickets or toil.

So if you’re investing in platform engineering, my advice is this:

Don’t build a platform. Build a product. And don’t build it for compliance - build it for trust.

Because in the end, the true value of a platform isn’t what it provides. It’s what it unlocks.

#PlatformEngineering , #DeveloperExperience , #DevOps , #InternalDeveloperPlatform