Platform Engineers: Sorry, Your Developers Are Not Your Customers

You've probably come across this common quote shared among platform engineering teams:

Treat your developers as customers

While this advice is shared with good intentions, this framing can lead to misaligned priorities and missed opportunities. The truth is, your colleagues are not your customers, they are your consumers. The business is your customer! Understanding this distinction is critical to the success of any platform team.

The Role of the Business

You were hired into a platform team because the business identified a need for such a central team. Perhaps they noticed that features were becoming harder to build and ship, incidents were increasing, or scaling the organization was becoming increasingly difficult. Your team's primary responsibility is to address these issues and unblock the business. While improving the developer experience and solving developer pain points is important, it's not necessarily the primary focus.

Aligning with business requirements often requires tough conversations. For example, regulatory requirements might force you to implement changes that initially make developers' lives harder but are necessary for long-term success.

Consider this example:

At a fintech company, a platform team introduces additional compliance steps into the deployment process. While developers initially have concerns about the extra work required, the change helps the company avoid regulatory complains and maintain customer trust. Over time, the platform team can automate parts of the process, improving both compliance and developer productivity.

Sometimes you need to deprecate certain tools or processes that, while convenient, no longer align with the business's evolving needs. What first feels like a loss for many enables the platform team to own the problem and provide a solution that can scale with the company.

The Role of Consumers

Your colleagues rely on your platform to do their jobs effectively. While their feedback is invaluable, it's important to balance their needs with the strategic priorities of the business. You will likely have to say "No" many more times than "Yes." Remember, every "Yes" leads to a distraction (for better or worse).

However this is also where things become tricky. Your platform isn't the only option available to developers. They often have access to many external tools, open-source solutions, or even shadow IT systems that promise to solve their problems faster or with seemingly lower overhead. This creates a competitive environment where your platform must continuously prove its value.

Developers might choose alternatives because they are already familiar with this tool or don't fully understand the capabilities of your platform.

While this competition might seem healthy at first, it can lead to fragmentation, and much worse problems. Beyond increased security risks and higher costs, the actual challenge for platform engineering teams is inconsistent standards. This will make any organization wide changes significantly more challenging to roll out.

Your Role

By positioning your platform as the best, business-aligned solution, you can mitigate security and fragmentation risks and deliver greater value to the organization as a whole. However, don't become lazy. Even if the business mandates your platform as the only allowed solution, you must still put in significant effort to ensure it integrates seamlessly with tools and workflows developers already use. This reduces friction and makes your platform the natural choice.

Here's an important insight: The real power of platforms lies in subtraction! Don't sell features, sell what teams no longer have to worry about. While developers value freedom and flexibility, they also appreciate being able to offload technical challenges they would otherwise have to manage themselves. Your platform's value isn't just in what it does; it's in what it eliminates.