Why Great Platform Engineers Think Like Product Builders
Platform Engineering, Thursday, April 17th, 2025
As the CTO of a CI/CD platform and someone who is in charge of leading our own internal platform team, I have experienced the rise of platform engineering first hand. These teams have quickly become essential to organizational success and CI/CD is at the heart of how they solve today's toughest software challenges.
Yet there's a crucial distinction between platform teams that accelerate their organizations and those that become bottlenecks. The difference lies in adopting a product mindset - viewing yourself as a product builder instead of an infrastructure specialist.
The Platform Engineering Paradox
When done right, platform engineering promises significant benefits: Increased product engineering velocity, reduced organizational risks and costs, and product teams free to focus on customer value. However, when approached incorrectly, platform teams often create overly complex toolkits that burden rather than benefit the developers they aim to support. In worst-case scenarios, they provide no value at all while creating additional overhead-becoming the very problem they meant to solve.