hey, thanks for creating this channel @David Schweizer!

Let’s try this for an icebreaker… As a PM, I’ve long leaned in to the Pragmatic Institute’s famous “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” We learn to listen to our customers and steer our teams towards what the evidence says the market needs, not towards what we personally think is cool. The teams we work with, though, are themselves developers and users of the platform tools they build. Do you find it hard to get your teams to build what their customers need rather than what they themselves want? Does their familiarity with the underlying systems interfere with their having empathy with customers who are less expert?

Hey all! I can't say how happy I am to have found this group. We (at Zalando) are in the midst of transforming our internal platform teams into product development teams. I am quite inspired by the work thoughtworks published about this: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-de/perspectives/edition4-platform-strategy/article

Anyone trying out Wardley Mapping? Any suggestions how you use those tools?

Just wrote something about changing the product management mentality from internal tooling to internal platforms. Hope it is helpful http://unremarkabletester.com/2022/05/18/from-internal-tools-to-internal-platforms-getting-started/

Besides my job at Zalando I am creating a non-profit / pro bono mentoring platform. If you are interested in joining or finding a mentor: We're already more than 300 product management mentors from all over the world. https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/category/product-management

Hi everyone - very excited to have found this community! My name is David Sanda, and I am a Director of Product Management - Platform at Best Buy. For anyone who hasn't heard of the company, we're a large specialty retailer focused on consumer electronics, appliances, and those sorts of things. I just traded a couple of notes with @Luca Galante, and he encouraged me to ask in this forum. Is there any survey that you folks know about regarding the "State of Platform" today? If so, I'd love to hear about it and join up if possible...if not, I've got a draft and would love to collaborate towards gaining an understanding of the 'whats and hows' of internal development platforms in use today.

As I am not a developer myself, I was wondering if there are others like me doing pm work for internal platforms? How common or uncommon is this? 😰

I'd love to connect with some engineering leaders or product managers in adjacent businesses (we're in insurance technology) to compare Platform Engineering org sizes and initiatives. Our Engineering team is 100 people.

I'm also looking for any guidance folks have on surfacing the value of Platform Engineering initiatives to the business side of a company to help answer questions like "Why is this tech initiative more important than this business initiative that is going to produce X $ per day?"

Hi folks - Was wondering if there’s any PMs out there that work on Developer Experience and would be open for a conversation. Please DM me!

👋 Good evening fellow PMs!

Was watching @Michael Galloway’s talk on building stuff people will actually use, which resonated super hard! My team is pretty good about trying to get customer feedback, but we don't always get a ton of customer engagement on those feedback loops. They'll talk to us if we get them 1:1, but we have pretty bad survey response rates, and find it hard to keep customers consistently engaged across all of the things my team owns. Anyone else struggle with this?

Is anyone aware of a classification model for cognitive load? I’m looking for something similar to the 7 Wastes of Lean. I’m ultimately looking for any tools and frameworks that could help my platform team (even our internal customers) "smell” cognitive load in our user’s experience and collaborate with common language (something more granular than “cognitive load”). I’m thinking about taking a stab at this myself but maybe there's already something similar out there?

Cool podcast on product management https://getdx.com/podcast/product-manager-platform-engineering

Hi all - a few of you asked me if I could share our platform KPI trees after the discussion in this thread. So, I published a blog post about our approach to platform KPIs at Wise: https://medium.com/wise-engineering/platform-engineering-kpis-6a3215f0ee14. Happy reading! 📖🙂

I’m a PM. I’m following a few tech youtube channels, however, most cover a lot of hardware stuff and there’s little pure software content. Which channels would you recommend to follow to keep up with pure software trends and news, and would also be helpful for learning new stuff that I can use at work?

Hi folks! Building platform (IDP) as a product is a new challenge for me. I'm working on a roadmap and release planning of our IDP and it's being a bit hard for me to validate "the right problems". Someone are using discovery methodologies (like lean inception) for help in definition of TVP, roadmap and next releases?

Wondering about the state of vendor management and how folks here think about (and deal with) wrapper overhead…. Unless you’re working at one of the tech behemoths, you’re buying large chunks of platform functionality — think version control, bug tracking, monitoring, etc., etc. — rather than building it yourself. But translating the SaaS tool you’ve bought into a complete product that meets your internal customers’ needs requires additional work and ongoing support. (Managing the relationship with the vendor, managing authN, customizing to your local workflows, etc.) How do you manage and assign that work? How does your organization resource it? What are your favorite best practices?

Unpopular opinion: I’m still very much on the fence if we should adopt an IDP (Backstage, or the like) What’s been the #1 argument for you to adopt it?

Do you have any recommendations for books on surveys? Or what NOT to do with a platform survey would help

Any PMs out there working on shared component team? We’re building out a team in our Platform org focused on building shared and re-usable components (e.g. auth layer for services). Curious if anyone has set up a team like this before. I’m trying to define scope / team charter before we start so we don’t turn into a kitchen sink team.

anyone willing to share a good job description they’ve used/seen/applied to for a PM on an internal platform eng team?

Folks do you have a product coach? Is this something that has worked for you? Is there any place where is easy to find one? I would like to improve my communication skills by having a better understanding of the personalities involved. What do you recommend me?

Hi folks! 👋 I was wondering if you were designing and executing engineering strategies as part of the Platform initiatives. In the past, we started to come with Engineering Strategies for the tribe but also for the Platforms teams. Thanks to that, I started to write openly about Engineering Strategy and came with this template that can help people to think about their strategy in a step by step way plus able to communicate and collaborate with the team. Let me know how are you doing the strategy today and if the template can help you! https://aleixmorgadas.notion.site/Engineering-Strategy-Template-910ad428d3d14c5a9aef4a4c32c4a8ba

Hello everyone!! What kind of team dynamics have you already done to help build the product vision?

I need to create my product vision, but not only the 'philosophical' one, but one more tangible to tell what are the limits of the product, what it is or does(and does not).

If there’s someone in your org neglecting the importance of product management in platform teams 💀, invite them to today’s webinar with Orgspace's Aaron Erickson. I promise you, he’ll change your mind 🧠. https://www.meetup.com/platform-engineers-atx-online/events/287588576/

Hey everyone! Grabbing some lunch, but I will be hanging out here all afternoon to take questions. Cheers!

Hi PMs!. Do you have any interview kit/video guide that you would like to share that uses the framework "Jobs to be done" for an Internal Dev Platform-product validation? I know there framework is heavily used for product discovery in general, but would be awesome if there is information out there tailored for IDP, like templates etc.