To really make an impact, platform engineering teams need to start thinking like product managers. That means deeply understanding their users, measuring outcomes instead of outputs, and tying everything they do to real business value.
Organizations who care about total cost of ownership and fast time to value are adopting this mindset.
Adopting a product management mindset is essential to lowering total cost of ownership and getting faster time to value with platforms that developers love and that move the business forward.
Why platform engineering needs a product mindset
Modern platform teams aren’t just automating infrastructure; they are creating an internal product whose customers are developers, SREs, security, leadership, and more.
Treating that platform like any other product, grounded in customer discovery, iterative delivery, and outcome-based metrics, turns “pipes and YAML” into a growth engine that drastically increases developer productivity and business impact.
Engineering excellence = business excellence
It’s not always easy to convince leadership to invest in internal tooling. However, when a platform’s capabilities are built with the 4 pillars of Engineering Excellence baked in, teams perform at a higher level and ship software that truly drives the business forward:
Engineering excellence pillar -> Business outcome
Velocity = Ship features faster -> Faster time-to-market
Reliability = Fewer incidents faster -> Improved customer experience
Efficiency = Lower cost of engineering, higher quality/output -> Better cost management
Security = Protecting company assets, building consumer trust -> Increased regulatory confidence
The through-line is clear: platforms are only valuable when they directly accelerate transformation, modernization, and productivity programs the C-suite already cares about.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Product management has a few common pitfalls where projects and initiatives fail. There are similar parallels that should be avoided when approaching platform engineering from a product mindset:
Product management pitfall -> Platform engineering parallel
Assuming needs -> Building for hypothetical devs
Shipping outputs not outcomes -> Optimizing infra over outcomes
Neglecting ecosystems -> Ignoring adjacent stakeholders
Skipping feedback loops -> Over-engineering
Trying to build everything -> Treating metrics as afterthought
Recognizing and actively countering these traps is step zero for any “platform-as-a-product” journey.
Five principles of “platform-as-a-product”
When you consider and solve for the pitfalls of platform engineering and product management, you end up with the following principals:
Anticipate needs, don’t just fulfill tickets
Talk less about features and more about pain points, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies.
Design for all personas
Survey devs and security, SRE, infra, compliance. Platforms live at cross-functional seams.
Prioritize features via research themes
Align backlog items with the business OKRs they unlock.
Deliver incremental value
Ship MVP slices early, gather data, iterate—just like any SaaS product.
Measure success with data-driven KPIs
Track DORA/SPACE metrics, adoption curves, and friction points blocking business outcomes.
Turning principles into reality: the internal developer portal
Organizations that care about total cost of ownership and fast time to value are adopting this mindset and using internal developer portals (IDP) like Cortex.
Cortex serves as a single pane of glass that combines:
Catalogs of services, infra, and teams
Scorecards & Initiatives for standards and modernization drives
Automations & Workflows that embed best practices in every PR or deploy
Dashboards for real-time visibility into productivity, reliability, and cost
The result is continuous improvement by default, safe self-service, and complete visibility without endless spreadsheets or tribal knowledge.
Measuring what matters
It’s easy to get stuck measuring what’s easy. But the real question is: did your platform reduce lead time? Unlock innovation? Improve developer satisfaction and cut cloud spend?
A good platform ties features to engineering KPIs to business KPIs, so teams stay focused on the work that actually moves the needle.
A scorecard that traces platform features → engineering KPIs → business KPIs keeps everyone from execs to individual contributors aligned on impact.
Key takeaways
Adopting a product management mindset is of particular interest to platform engineering organizations who are looking to lower the total cost of ownership of their platform, or want faster time to value for their developers/internal customers.
Rather than spending thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a build/semi-build project that is slow, costly and without guarantee of success or value, they are adopting out of the box Internal Developer Portal solutions.
These portals are helping teams approach platform engineering to:
Think product, not project: Your platform is the product.
Prioritize outcomes over outputs: Every product should map to a measurable business outcome.
Iterate relentlessly: Ship, gather feedback, evolve.
Own the metrics: Reliability, velocity, security, cost, whatever matters to the organization, belongs on the platform team’s dashboard.
Ready to dive deeper? We’d love to chat with you about how to start: book a demo
