We obsess over our external customers, and rightly so. But who’s building for the builders? There’s a powerful shift happening where top-tier companies are treating their internal developer platforms not as cost centers, but as legitimate, strategic products.
This “Platform as a Product” mindset means applying our core PM skills—user research, roadmapping, and feedback loops—to the tools our own engineering teams use every day. Your ‘users’ in this case are your developers, and their experience (DevEx) directly impacts your company’s velocity and innovation. When an internal platform is clunky or undocumented, it creates friction that slows down feature delivery for your actual customers.
By treating it as a product, you assign clear ownership to understand developer pain points, create a strategic roadmap, and measure success (e.g., reduced deployment time, higher developer satisfaction). Just like with external products, you need a clear system for gathering and prioritizing this internal feedback. Using a tool like https://leera.io to create a transparent backlog for platform teams can transform the dynamic from reactive firefighting to strategic enablement. It’s about building a solid foundation so everyone else can go faster.
How does your organization handle internal platforms? Are they treated as first-class products with clear ownership, or are they a collection of ad-hoc tools?