Instead of waiting for experience teams to request an API, platform teams should analyze top-level business goals and proactively propose services that unlock new use cases. This shifts the dynamic from a reactive service desk to a strategic partner.
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Platform value isn't developer efficiency. It's enabling developers to build features that solve end-customer problems and drive business outcomes like retention. The platform PM must connect their work across this two-step chain to secure investment.
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.
Stakeholders will ask "so what?" if you only talk about developer efficiency. This is a weak argument that can get your funding cut. Instead, connect your platform's work directly to downstream business metrics like customer retention or product uptake that your developer-users are targeting.
Instead of passively waiting for experience teams to request an API, platform teams should proactively identify business opportunities. Go to other teams with proposals for new services that can unlock use cases they haven't even considered, positioning your team as a strategic partner, not a cost center.
To get product management buy-in for technical initiatives like refactoring or scaling, engineering leadership is responsible for translating the work into clear business or customer value. Instead of just stating the technical need, explain how it enables faster feature development or access to a larger customer base.
Avoid the trap of building features for a single customer, which grinds products to a halt. When a high-stakes customer makes a specific request, the goal is to reframe and build it in a way that benefits the entire customer base, turning a one-off demand into a strategic win-win.
Shift your team's language from tracking output (e.g., 'deployed XYZ API') to tracking outcomes. Reframe milestones to focus on the business capability you have 'unlocked' for other teams. This small linguistic change reorients the team toward business impact and clarifies your contribution to metrics like NPS.
Shift the team's language and metrics away from output. Instead of celebrating a deployed API, measure and report on what that API enabled for other teams and the business. This directly connects platform work to tangible results and impact.
To create transformational enterprise solutions, focus on the core problems of the key buyers, not just the feature requests of technical users. For healthcare payers, this meant solving strategic issues like care management and risk management, which led to stickier, higher-value products than simply delivering another tool.
