As organizations modernize their software delivery pipelines, platform engineering is emerging to deliver infrastructure with the same discipline and rigor as customer-facing products.
Instead of operating as back-office “ticket takers,” platform teams are adopting product management principles — roadmaps, feedback loops and clear ownership — to accelerate developer velocity and align more closely with business outcomes.
Kurt Schrader, co-founder and CEO of Shortcut, argues that this shift is overdue.
“When platform teams adopt a product mindset, they start treating internal developers as customers, maintaining roadmaps that communicate vision rather than just managing backlogs of requests, and establishing feedback loops that surface pain points,” he says.
The implications go beyond how teams structure their work, because instead of optimizing for control and compliance, they optimize for self-service and autonomy.
In addition, instead of measuring success solely through SLAs and incident counts, they track developer satisfaction, time-to-production, and platform adoption rates.
From Reactive to Intentional
For Schrader, tools like roadmaps and feedback loops are central to making the change from reactive support to proactive enablement.
“Roadmaps move the team from reactive to intentional,” he says. “They force teams to prioritize capabilities based on developer impact and communicate what’s coming so teams can plan accordingly.
This transparency builds trust and invites collaboration rather than creating a black box where developers just submit tickets and hope that their needs get prioritized.
Feedback loops, meanwhile, provide insights that tickets rarely reveal.
“They surface the real friction points that tickets never capture,” Schrader notes.
Regular surveys, office hours, embedded platform engineers and usage analytics often expose issues such as long onboarding times or deployment anxiety.
“These insights drive roadmap priorities in ways that individual ticket requests cannot,” he says.
Together, roadmaps and feedback cycles create a virtuous loop: building what matters, measuring adoption and satisfaction, learning from usage and refining strategy.
Ownership Roles, Measuring Success
One of the clearest distinctions between an IT service approach and a product mindset is ownership. Schrader emphasizes that clear accountability reframes the work.
“Clear ownership changes the question from ‘whose ticket is this?’ to ‘who is responsible for this outcome?’” he says.
A platform product owner, in this view, is accountable not just for uptime, but for measurable business outcomes like developer velocity.
“This empowers teams to say no to requests that don’t align with strategy and yes to investments that unlock business value, even without an obvious ticket driving them,” Schrader explains.
As with customer-facing products, platform engineering requires new metrics to demonstrate value. Schrader highlights measures that speak directly to the developer experience.
“For developers, the metrics that matter are time from commit to production, deployment frequency, onboarding time for new engineers, setup time for new machines,” he says.
In addition, developer satisfaction surveys can add nuance, surfacing frustrations that quantitative metrics might miss. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce friction and shorten learning cycles.
“We’re trying to create an environment where people can develop and ship faster and the time to learning is greatly reduced,” Schrader explains.
From Cost Center to Competitive Advantage
Moving from traditional IT frameworks to product-oriented platform engineering is not just a technical change — it is also cultural. Schrader describes the transition as one from risk avoidance to enablement.
“Traditional IT rewarded saying no and preventing incidents,” he says. “Product-oriented platform engineering requires celebrating yes and enabling experimentation.”
That shift requires new incentives. Schrader points to rewarding productivity improvements instead of ticket closure rates, embedding platform engineers with product teams, and reframing IT leaders as enablers rather than gatekeepers.
“It means changing incentive structures to reward developer productivity improvements instead of ticket closure rates, breaking down silos by embedding platform teams with product engineering, and getting IT leaders to stop thinking of themselves as gatekeepers and start thinking of themselves as enablers of speed and agility,” he says.
When platform engineering is treated as a product, it changes how organizations think about investment.
“Ultimately, this changes the conversation from defending IT budgets to investing in competitive advantage,” Schrader says.
By removing undifferentiated heavy lifting, accelerating deployment cycles and reducing developer friction, platform teams position themselves as central to delivering value at scale.
The shift is not easy, requiring both structural and cultural adjustments. But as Schrader makes clear, platform engineering can redefine the role of IT in the enterprise.
“When your platform team removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting, accelerates deployment cycles and reduces friction in the development process, your organization can move faster and sustain an ever-increasing pace of shipping value to customers,” he says.