There’s a huge conversation happening right now around developer experience, and it’s forcing a major shift in how we think about internal tooling. For too long, internal platforms—our CI/CD pipelines, component libraries, and data infrastructure—have been treated as ad-hoc engineering projects. The result? Friction, duplicated work, and slower delivery cycles for customer-facing features.
The solution is to start treating your platform as a product.
This means applying the same product management discipline to your internal tools as you do to your external ones. Your developers are your customers. You need to understand their pain points, conduct user research, and build a strategic roadmap that prioritizes their needs. The goal is to create a paved road that makes it easy for engineering teams to ship high-quality code, fast.
By focusing on developer velocity and satisfaction, you create a massive leverage point for the entire organization. When your internal platform is a well-oiled machine, every other product team can innovate more effectively. It’s crucial to centralize insights and requirements from these internal users, just as you would for external ones using a tool like Leera.io to avoid letting feedback fall through the cracks.
So, how are you applying product thinking to your internal platforms, and what’s the biggest hurdle you’ve faced in getting organizational buy-in?