Internal platforms aren’t just infrastructure — they’re products for developers. Treating the platform as a product means designing and evolving it with the same care you’d give any customer-facing service: understand users, ship improvements, measure adoption.
Here’s what “platform as a product” means in practice and how to adopt the mindset.
What It Means
Traditionally, platforms were a collection of scripts, CI/CD templates, and ad hoc tools. The platform as a product approach changes that: the platform team behaves like a product team with clear customers (internal developers).
That means:
- Defining user needs and pain points
- Prioritizing features and roadmaps
- Gathering feedback and iterating
- Owning developer experience end-to-end
Often this takes shape as an Internal Developer Platform (IDP): a curated, self-service system built on technologies like Kubernetes, GitOps, and developer portals such as Backstage.
Why It Matters
- Better developer experience — Friction goes down, focus on product goes up.
- Faster delivery — Consistent paths to production shorten cycle time.
- Clearer ownership — Platform and app teams have well-defined responsibilities.
- Adaptability — A roadmap-driven platform evolves with business and tech changes.
- Cost and risk control — Shared security, compliance, and resource governance.
How to Adopt
- Form a dedicated platform team — Engineers plus product-minded roles to own the platform.
- Identify internal customers — Talk to developers, gather pain points and priorities.
- Define a roadmap — Start with high-value features (“golden paths”) and evolve.
- Measure success — Track adoption, developer satisfaction, time to deploy.
- Iterate continuously — Update based on feedback and metrics; remove unused or confusing features.
Treating the platform as a product keeps it aligned with what developers actually need. It helps avoid unused tooling and builds trust between platform and product teams. Combined with Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices, this mindset leads to safer, faster, and more efficient delivery at scale.