Platform Engineering As A Product: Why IT Leaders Need To Think Like Product Managers
Platform Engineering, Friday, October 3rd, 2025
As organizations modernize their software delivery pipelines, platform engineering is emerging to deliver infrastructure with the same discipline and rigor as customer-facing products.
Instead of operating as back-office 'ticket takers,' platform teams are adopting product management principles - roadmaps, feedback loops and clear ownership - to accelerate developer velocity and align more closely with business outcomes.
Kurt Schrader, co-founder and CEO of Shortcut, argues that this shift is overdue.
'When platform teams adopt a product mindset, they start treating internal developers as customers, maintaining roadmaps that communicate vision rather than just managing backlogs of requests, and establishing feedback loops that surface pain points,' he says.