remember that Platform is a Product. Think about it as promoting a Developer to be a Product Owner. The same principles here, Platform is not a "magical, different thing". It's yet another system supporting business process in the organization - here, SDLC is that business process.

in my opinion, the best PO for a Platform is somebody who was a Software Engineer before (working on Business Applications). Because this person knows best the Platform Customer need - having an experience being one

what are your needs as an org? Do you need someone tactical who focuses on delivery or someone who can put an strategy and rally that with stakeholders? The previously engineer may excel at the first but the experienced product person may shine at the second, what do you care the most?

Hiring managers should define very clear what are their requirements, expectations, negotiable and non negotiable for the PM they need…it is possible to set both for success it is just a matter of how much they are willing to invest in the person.

I really appreciate all the detailed responses in this thread ! Maybe if someone has time, a short blog post could definitely be created based on these comments. Would be a good read, too !

I can also answer from my perspective, as someone who worked in platform and now works in product… 1. Product is not engineering. PM skills are hard to learn - Engineers trying to learn product without a good internal mentor is going to be exceptionally hard. If your environment doesn’t have good product role models already, converting a platform engineering into a PM is going to be very hard. They might not be successful, and you might burn that platform engineer or the platform initiative itself by putting too much pressure / expectation. 2. Promoting a platform engineer directly is unlikely to produce “outsized” results - I would be deeply, deeply surprised if you can promote and engineer to a PM title, without any serious mentorship, and then get significantly outsized results, beyond let’s say just having a bunch of product-minded engineers in the first place. That engineer is going to do their best, but underneath it all, they are still an engineer, and I believe they might risk falling back on trying to use “what made them good” at engineering, but trying to apply that to product. See point #1. 3. Hiring outside PM’s with lower tech knowledge could help, but mostly for coaching - A solution could be hiring an outside PM with or without deep tech knowledge (doesn’t matter, aslong as they’re a good PM). Or, bringing an internal PM “on loan” from a product team to support and guide. Having a platform candidate then step up and be mentored by a seasoned PM seems like the best middle ground. Platform and existing tech knowledge, twinned with seasoned experienced PM input. If I were starting a platform team again from scratch today, I’d go with #3 if I could.