Internal Platform Product Management: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
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The Role of Internal Platform Product Managers
Product managers seeking a challenge are ideal candidates for the position of internal platform product manager (PM), as highlighted by 16 industry professionals I interviewed for a Product School discussion. With internal platform teams becoming integral in many software companies, it's essential to delve deeper into their responsibilities. This article will summarize key insights from those conversations, focusing on the main challenges and benefits, along with the skills and behaviors that contribute to success in this role.
What Constitutes an Internal Platform?
Engineers, data scientists, analysts, and others are responsible for generating value and addressing customer needs through the continuous development and management of their company’s products. When you inquire about their daily tasks, it becomes clear they have multiple responsibilities. They must plan, code, test, and launch product features while mitigating technical debt, fixing security vulnerabilities, and ensuring seamless operations, often needing to respond to incidents around the clock. At the same time, there’s a growing demand from both business stakeholders and customers for quicker time-to-market, enhanced product availability, and improved performance—all while adhering to compliance regulations and maintaining cost efficiency.
Internal platforms offer a solution to the increasingly complex technical ecosystem. Their primary aim is to simplify tasks for engineers, allowing them to deliver value to end customers more efficiently.
While internal platforms do not currently handle planning, coding, or testing directly, they provide essential capabilities that facilitate these processes. Internal platform PMs view their internal users as customers, measuring success through factors like productivity, reliability, risk management, cost efficiency, and developer experience.
The internal platform consists of various layers, each building on the previous one to add value and abstraction.
Foundational platforms deliver cloud services tailored to the specific needs of the organization. Developer enablement teams create tools that streamline daily development tasks such as software delivery, reliability engineering, machine learning, and analytics.
Google’s annual State of DevOps Report underscores the positive correlation between software delivery and operational performance with overall business success. Given the pivotal role internal platforms play in these areas, it’s no surprise that platform engineering is emerging as a significant trend in the industry.
By 2026, Gartner predicts that 80% of large software engineering companies will form platform engineering teams to serve as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.
If internal platforms are so strategically vital, how can organizations optimize them? Product management offers frameworks and methodologies to address this critical question: how can we create the right products in the right way?
Platform as a Product
Organizations often struggle to initiate internal platforms, and those with existing teams frequently question their effectiveness. This ambiguity can often be traced back to a lack of product-oriented thinking.
"Many of the disappointments organizations face with platforms arise from not treating them as products." — Thoughtworks
Here are some essential questions that individuals overseeing an internal platform roadmap need to consider:
- How can we determine if our developments are impactful?
- How do we gauge whether our customers (engineers) are productive and satisfied?
- With more ideas than available time, which should we prioritize?
- Should we focus on enhancing reliability or accelerating delivery?
- How can we best align with our company’s mission and strategy?
- What are our competitors doing? Should we increase our investment in platforms?
In essence, a robust product strategy, supported by thorough insights and a proactive product discovery process, is essential for the success of internal platforms. Addressing these questions is not just a full-time task for each internal platform but also for every platform team. Cultivating a product-centric mindset within a platform engineering organization can be achieved through dedicated PMs collaborating closely with engineering teams.
"Platform product managers create roadmaps and ensure the platform delivers value to the business while enhancing the developer experience. We see this approach as crucial for building internal platforms." — Thoughtworks
An increasing number of job openings for internal platform PMs indicates that this model is gaining traction. So, what should you seek when hiring an internal platform PM? Let’s examine the unique challenges of this role from three perspectives: the customer, the product, and the outcome.
- Customers: Internal platform PMs serve their colleagues as customers, forming a captive audience. Most customers are engineers who typically have strong opinions about the product, informed by their technical expertise and direct interaction with the tools.
- Product: Defining the internal platform itself can be complex. It may consist of individual tools or encompass all tools necessary for a specific user journey. These tools are often mandatory, raising questions about whether internal platforms can be considered genuine products.
- Outcome: Assessing the impact or business outcomes of internal platforms can be tricky. Investments in infrastructure or tools may yield delayed returns, causing postponed gratification. With core infrastructure products, there’s limited room for experimentation or failure; if foundational layers falter, it could disrupt the entire organization.
Armed with a foundational understanding of internal platforms and the internal platform PM role, let’s delve into real-world insights from PMs to gain a deeper understanding of what it entails to make a significant impact.
What Does It Take to Succeed?
The following section draws from the experiences of 16 internal platform PMs worldwide. To gain a more objective understanding of the challenges and success criteria in this role, they were asked three questions:
- What are the main challenges of this role?
- What do you enjoy most about it?
- What are the key factors for success?
While each PM provided distinct insights, several themes emerged consistently.
Major Challenges
The primary challenge faced by internal platform PMs is quantifying and communicating their impact. The relationship between infrastructure improvements or enhanced developer productivity and overall business impact is often unclear. A significant part of the role involves articulating the value of internal platforms to non-technical stakeholders. To secure funding for the platform team, a compelling business case must be presented in a language that resonates with stakeholders.
The second notable challenge is the sensation of isolation and lack of support. Without established processes, many internal platform PMs must justify their value and existence. Unlike traditional PMs who often have access to resources like UX, market research, or analytics support, internal platform PMs frequently handle these tasks independently. Supporting data, such as KPIs or user analytics, is often sparse, necessitating a heavy investment in qualitative research like user interviews. Moreover, PMs working on customer-facing products may not fully grasp the impact of internal platform PMs, leading to feelings of detachment from the broader product organization—a sentiment reflected in organizational reporting structures.
The third frequently mentioned challenge is the complexity and broad scope of the domain. Internal platform PMs engage with highly technical products, such as Kubernetes, distributed systems, or NoSQL databases. The expansive and intricate cloud-native landscape exemplifies the deep knowledge required for this role. Many tools and frameworks within this ecosystem are vital for composing an internal platform. Consequently, many PMs feel they are not experts in their own products. The role extends beyond technology; internal platform PMs must understand developer productivity metrics (DORA) and create an outstanding developer experience while ensuring compliance and security are integrated seamlessly.
The constant context-switching required to manage various platform teams, cross-functional duties, technical challenges, and a multitude of stakeholders adds to the complexity of the role.
As we explore in the next section, many of these challenges can be both burdensome and rewarding, with numerous PMs finding fulfillment in these very difficulties.
The Most Rewarding Aspects of the Role
The absence of a clear path for building internal platforms and a degree of separation from immediate business outcomes can also yield benefits: autonomy and freedom. While this may seem daunting, it can also be incredibly motivating. Independence allows for less external oversight and more opportunities to engage in long-term strategic planning. Additionally, since the "market" consists of the company’s own developer community, there is generally less scrutiny and a diminished need for coordination in market entry efforts, resulting in shorter feedback loops and a more efficient product development process.
A significant advantage of this role is the proximity to customers. As your customers are your colleagues, they are usually more receptive to participating in user research and engaging in the product development process. While this means critical product feedback is just a Slack message away, the chance to witness the positive impact on your customers’ experiences is invaluable. Furthermore, internal platform PMs interact with a diverse range of stakeholders, including CTOs, CPOs, CISOs, and Heads of Risk, fostering collaboration.
Navigating the intricacies of such a high-leverage and foundational technical domain can be challenging. However, it is often the aspect of the job that internal platform PMs find most rewarding. They have the unique opportunity to understand the technical underpinnings of their products while also benefiting from personal growth by staying abreast of technology trends. Working in uncharted territories presents vast untapped opportunities for making an impact. Platforms inherently possess high leverage potential, leading to extensive opportunities and compounded impact that many PMs can only aspire to achieve.
What Skills Are Essential for Success?
Every organization has its unique culture, structure, and technological maturity. A PM's success in one company does not guarantee the same in another. Nevertheless, certain recurring themes appear to predict success and job satisfaction in this role. A PM equipped with these skills and attributes is well-prepared to navigate the challenges and enjoy the rewards that accompany the position.
- Intrinsic Motivation: “You can’t always be a striker” was a sentiment echoed in the interviews. Internal platform PMs need a strong sense of intrinsic motivation, as they often do not receive immediate recognition from the rest of the organization. Gratification may be delayed or may not occur at all.
- Strong Storytelling Abilities: Given the technical nature of the role and its indirect business impact, internal platform PMs must be adept storytellers, capable of simplifying complex technical concepts and their implications for non-technical stakeholders without losing their attention.
- Fluency with Engineers: The capacity to converse in engineers' language and empathize with their challenges is essential. This requires the PM to be tech-savvy enough to use their own products and familiarize themselves with the technical tools and user journey.
- Rapid Learning Ability: The fast-evolving tech landscape and diverse requirements of an internal platform demand PMs who can learn quickly and think through various technical and business problems. The frequency of context changes in this role is unparalleled compared to many other PM positions.
- Resilience: As this role is still developing, it is common for platform teams to have never collaborated with a PM before. Promoting your role and instilling a product mindset can be daunting, especially with persistent setbacks. However, with determination and trust-building, the effort can yield significant rewards.
- Curiosity About Technology: While many organizations do not strictly require a technical background, internal platform PMs should be eager to learn about the technical aspects of their work. The following summary illustrates the proportion of the 16 PMs who consider themselves to have a technical background, such as prior experience as software engineers. Each confirmed the necessity of substantial on-the-job upskilling.
Conclusion
The trend of platform engineering is just beginning to take shape. Internal platforms are evolving into a competitive advantage that software-driven organizations cannot overlook—effectively leveraging them is becoming a vital capability. It is evident that PMs are instrumental in advancing the discipline of platform engineering and ensuring internal platforms achieve their promised strategic impact.
The internal platform PM role is tailored for those who wish to create an impact without relying on constant affirmation and who aspire to engage closely with technology while maintaining a broad perspective. It’s an ideal position for any “product manager looking for a challenge.”