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 ensure clarity and impact, mandate that any explanation of the platform team's work to non-technical stakeholders must be understandable in under three minutes. This forces the team to distill their message to its core value, cutting through technical jargon.
To make platform progress compelling for executives, avoid code demos. Instead, stage a "before and after" customer scenario. Team members can role-play as a customer and an agent to vividly show how a new API improves the experience or saves time.
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.
When stakeholders want to ship a high-fidelity prototype immediately, counter by explaining the required effort using numbers. Frame the work in terms of scale (e.g., "This must support 200 products, each requiring a week of testing") to manage expectations and justify proper engineering.
To demonstrate value, platform teams must explicitly connect contributions to top-line business metrics. Use internal newsletters to show how a new service directly enabled an uplift in a key metric like Net Promoter Score, making the platform's ROI undeniable.
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.