Platform as a Product

This paper discusses the importance of treating internal developer platforms as products and focusing on providing an excellent developer experience to drive adoption and improve software delivery across an organization.

The authors, Bryan Finster and Justin Thomsen, share their experiences building developer platforms at Walmart and John Deere, respectively. They emphasize the need for a centralized platform with a clear mission and vision, empathy for users, and a focus on making it easy for developers to do the right thing.

Key points include:

1. Using continuous delivery as a lever to drive improvements and scale good engineering practices.

2. Organizing platform teams around capabilities and giving them autonomy and accountability.

3. Providing opinionated, self-service tools that abstract complexity while allowing flexibility when needed.

4. Embedding security, compliance, and governance into the platform to ensure safe, rapid delivery.

5. Leveraging metrics, gamification, and documentation to drive adoption and improvement.

6. Establishing a strong platform brand and culture of openness and sharing.

7. Scaling the platform's impact through targeted training, coaching, and enabling power users.

The authors stress the importance of a user-centric mindset and treating the platform as a product to provide an irresistible developer experience. By doing so, organizations can dramatically improve software delivery performance and developer productivity.

What's inside

• Centralization — Standardize tools and processes on a single platform to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Empathy — Focus on developer needs and abstract complexity to create an irresistible user experience.
• Governance — Embed security, compliance, and best practices into the platform to enable safe, rapid delivery.
• Scalability — Drive adoption and improvement at scale through self-service, training, and cultivating champions.