As the CTO of a CI/CD platform and someone who is in charge of leading our own internal platform team, I have experienced the rise of platform engineering first hand. These teams have quickly become essential to organizational success and CI/CD is at the heart of how they solve today’s toughest software challenges.
Yet there’s a crucial distinction between platform teams that accelerate their organizations and those that become bottlenecks. The difference lies in adopting a product mindset – viewing yourself as a product builder instead of an infrastructure specialist.
The Platform Engineering Paradox
When done right, platform engineering promises significant benefits: Increased product engineering velocity, reduced organizational risks and costs, and product teams free to focus on customer value. However, when approached incorrectly, platform teams often create overly complex toolkits that burden rather than benefit the developers they aim to support. In worst-case scenarios, they provide no value at all while creating additional overhead—becoming the very problem they meant to solve.
This paradox stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the platform team’s purpose. Many platform teams view themselves primarily as technical specialists building infrastructure rather than as product builders serving customers. This mindset leads to solutions that are technically impressive but practically unusable—or worse, unused.
Embracing the Product Mindset
Successful platform engineering requires viewing your work through a product lens. This shift in perspective changes everything: From how teams prioritize work to how they measure success. The foundation of the product mindset is recognizing that product engineers or developers focused on building features are not just colleagues but the very customers whose business and trust must be earned. This recognition fundamentally changes the platform-product team relationship.
Instead of building what they think product teams need, successful platform teams invest time understanding their customer’s actual challenges, workflows, and pain points. They conduct user research, create personas and map developer journeys—just as product teams do for external customers.
This approach creates a virtuous cycle: As platform teams deliver value that addresses real needs, they earn trust, which leads to greater adoption. Greater adoption provides more feedback, enabling the platform team to refine their offerings further. Over time, this cycle creates a platform that truly serves its users rather than one that exists for its own sake.
Developer Experience Obsession
Great platform teams obsess over developer experience with the same intensity that product teams focus on end-user experience. They understand that adoption relies on adding value, not mandates.
This obsession manifests in countless ways: Intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, self-service capabilities and rapid support. These teams relentlessly measure and improve time-to-value metrics. They ask: “How quickly can a new developer become productive on our platform?” and constantly work to reduce that time.
They also recognize that developers have choices. Even in organizations with “mandatory” platforms, developers find workarounds for tools that hinder rather than help. The best platform teams acknowledge this reality and focus on creating platforms so valuable that developers choose them willingly.
Balancing Compliance with Developer Experience
Security and compliance requirements grow increasingly complex and while necessary, can create toil for product teams that need to move fast. Successful platform teams transform these potential obstacles into seamless guardrails. They make it easier for teams to align with complex and evolving standards while making it difficult to do the wrong thing.
This approach represents a paradigm shift from compliance as a checkpoint to compliance as a built-in feature. Rather than creating processes where security reviews become bottlenecks, they build security validation into the everyday CI/CD workflows their teams already use. They automate assessments, provide clear feedback, and offer simple remediation paths.
This integration means product teams can move fast without breaking things. The platform becomes an enabler of both speed and safety—eliminating the false dichotomy between velocity and compliance.
Business Impact Focus
Ultimately, platform engineering exists to accelerate the business. The most effective platform teams explicitly connect their work to business outcomes. Their goal isn’t to build cool technology; it’s to boost performance, innovation, and business impact for product teams while optimizing resources and costs.
They track metrics that matter to the organization: How much faster do teams deliver with the platform than without it? How much has the error rate decreased? How much developer time has been freed up for innovation rather than maintenance? These teams can quantify their value in terms executives understand and support.
Beyond the standard KPIs, you may also want to track a more unexpected metric: Thank you notes from your product engineers. As platform leaders, seek validation that you’re providing the right solutions by measuring/collecting literal ‘thank you’ notes from developers. This metric is a meaningful North Star when it comes to understanding if you are solving the right problems.
The Path Forward
For platform engineering teams looking to adopt this product mindset, the journey starts with honest self-assessment. Are you building what you think is technically interesting, or what your users actually need? Are you measuring your success by technical metrics or by the success of your customers? Are you seen as an enabler or a bottleneck?
The transformation requires cultural change. Platform teams must develop empathy for their users, embrace feedback (even when difficult to hear), and measure themselves by the success of others, rather than technical accomplishments. They must become comfortable serving rather than directing.
This shift isn’t easy, but the rewards are substantial. Platform teams that successfully adopt a product mindset become strategic assets to their organizations—accelerating innovation, reducing risk and creating environments where developers can do their best work.
In a world where technical talent is both scarce and expensive, organizations can’t afford platform teams that don’t deliver value. By thinking like product builders, platform engineering teams transform from cost centers to value multipliers—making them indispensable to modern technology organizations.