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Some orgs don't or essentially pass the function to platform engineers but our findings from Puppets state of dev ops report was that companies with dedicated product managers had more impact with their platforms My talk on these findings is in the culture track day 2 https://www.puppet.com/resources/state-of-platform-engineering

Appreciate the feedback and looking forward to hearing you talk about it.

You may find some answers on this one too @Dien N : https://platformcon.com/talks/platform-as-a-superpower

IMO - definitely yes. Check out my talk about it from yesterday! https://platformcon.com/talks/platform-engineering-is-all-about-product

is it common for organizations to have multiple platform engineering teams that specialize in different areas of technology and infrastructure, such as databases and containers?

We found in our report most organisations had multiple platforms which we expected to come from specific departments and teams to meet these different technology needs. We would not recommend anyone tried to build a single platform.

I have seen 2 platforms being used multiple times, and even between the two the goal is never to cover 100% of the Devs needs (80%/20% is more a common goal). There could be also a need to have a specific setup for some COTS apps (to run on specific K8s runtimes). But I agree with David, a Modern Apps/IaaS one + a CaaS for K8s are the most 2 frequent ones I have seen so far (as platforms). With the IDP + Golden paths buzz/need/era, and the significant adoption of Dev frameworks (like Backstage), the Dev Portals are positioned as the one single self service shop to consume services across platforms (target still ~80% of the Dev needs), with doc-as-code, clear visibility on ownership, faster Dev onboarding time, search engine and minimum RBAC. There are some great IDP stories (and some lessons learned) shared in the talks. My preferred one is the Adobe one: but there are many other good ones.

My company is a SaaS Data Analytics vendor and we have a Cloud Infrastructure Product Manager / Director. His group also covers services like auth, billing, licensing as well. For our Internal Developer Platform, My Sr. Manager and an Operations manager play product for the IDP and DevEx. The engineers building the IDP also play a part in the product role as they speak with internal customers about features. The Sr. Manager / Operations Manager, scope and prioritize them. Long winded answer is when there isn't a product manager, the work still needs to get done.

I think if you want to build the right platform products to enable product teams to focus on their core competencies then having a Product capability within platform will definitely help build customer empathy and ensure you build compelling platform capabilities that are fit for purpose. This was the approach I took while leading the Platform Engineering function at my company