Why your digital platform needs a product strategy

A platform engineering team helps businesses accelerate the ability for internal teams to build and improve the company’s digital products and services, whilst also helping those teams to run the services they support.  An internal digital platform is often the solution that is built by organisations when they are running digital services at scale. However time again I see a lack of understanding of what is really needed by the organisation from a digital platform and how users of the platform can have their needs met and they are communicated to on what is quite obviously a product that is made for internal users. 

My colleagues Brendan and Sandy have talked extensively about product strategy and have shared a simple and powerful template for product strategy on the miroverse. So why do I think that your internal platform needs a product strategy? 

First, your internal platform is a product. It has customers (users), it solves problems for those users and it produces value when it solves those problems. 

Second, at its core the product strategy ensures your team builds the right thing; it’s the why and what of your product compared to the how that logically exists in the product backlog and roadmap. The strategy specifically targets the user problems you’re going to solve, and we know that when we solve user problems we create value for those users and importantly value for your business. 

Marty Cagan sums up value creation nicely and a product strategy is the perfect mechanism to create alignment between the business’s goals (viability) with user needs (value) whilst also enabling us to tackle critical questions around feasibility and usability. 

In my experience internal platforms have been created from the ground up by platform engineers, often with little or no product thinking let alone any strategy. Don’t get me wrong, engineers are pretty much my favourite people but the internal platform is often imagined and created based on what we think (rather than demonstrably know) those other internal teams need and often with less insight around the business value. 

Take the implementation of Kubernetes for containerisation, or Kafka for event management. Both are valid tools to use but now that I’ve reflected on these products, I wonder how much better they could have been if they’d had a product strategy earlier; particularly as I contemplate how well those products understood users and user value as well as business value. The insight I took away with product strategy is it forces us to focus and it helps us avoid common accidents like over engineering the platform. 

The product strategy also brings to the foreground concepts such as the product lifecycle. Applying this to an internal platform as you build ensures you are solving the right problems, building the right features, for where the product is in its lifecycle.

Are you in the early phase of piloting it with a few small teams, are you scaling it across the organisation or even more dramatically, is the platform still needed or is it time to kill or end of life it. 

I have used the product strategy to great effect for platform engineering in both start ups and in scaled businesses, and I’ve found it particularly useful for a scale up when you are know you have a problem, for example, with speed to market yet you want to retain autonomy in teams and you need quick speed to restore services in the case of incidents. 

A strategy has allowed me to see clearly the things we need to do first and also what areas add most benefit to teams. It’s been super helpful to focus the team as well, particularly around stuff we’re not going to do and crucially I found it acts as an important artefact when communicating goals, objectives and outcomes across the organisation. 

If you want to hear more about applying product strategy to your internal platform please contact me at hello@organa.com.au or find and connect with me on LinkedIn.