A significant maturity gap in large organizations is that internal platform PMs don't treat their users (e.g., developers, finance) as customers. Applying customer-centric practices like problem framing and journey mapping to these stakeholders can dramatically improve outcomes.

When different departments push their own projects onto the sales team, reps get overloaded. To solve this, enablement leaders must shift the focus of every initiative away from departmental priorities and toward a shared customer outcome. This unified goal minimizes internal friction and clarifies what's truly important.

A platform's immediate user is the developer. However, to demonstrate true value, you must also understand and solve for the developer's end customer. This "two-hop" thinking is essential for connecting platform work to tangible business outcomes, not just internal technical improvements.

Engineering often defaults to a 'project mindset,' focusing on churning out features and measuring velocity. True alignment with product requires a 'product mindset,' which prioritizes understanding the customer and tracking the value being delivered, not just the output.

Unlike application businesses, infrastructure companies' success is measured by their ecosystem's success. They receive all the blame when things fail but little direct glory when they work. This requires a focus on enabling customer outcomes above all else.

For AI initiatives to succeed, RevOps must adopt a product-oriented mindset. This means moving beyond reactively fulfilling requests for dashboards and reports to proactively building and managing systems that solve the core problems of their "customers"—the sales reps and GTM leaders.

The debate between being product-led vs. sales-led is a false dichotomy that creates friction. Instead, frame all functions as fundamentally 'customer-driven.' This reframing encourages product teams to view sales requests not as distractions, but as valuable, direct insights into customer needs.

To maximize their value, forward deployed engineers (FDEs) should not be a separate services team. Integrating them directly into the product organization ensures faster, higher-fidelity customer feedback and context capture, which directly shapes the core product.

Customer friction often arises when operational or financial decisions are made in a silo, without input from customer-facing teams. The people who understand the customer perspective must be in the room when policies are created, not just when they are implemented.