👋 Hello everyone! I'm Alvin, a product manager for my company's Internal Developer Platform (IDP) team. Happy to finally be in the slack channel, learning from, and sharing with everyone. At my company, IDP is sort of a umbrella team for dev tools, platform engineering, driving BE & FE standardization. There are 3 sub-teams divided into domains: Infra, "Backend", "Frontend". The core product offerings of my collective teams are: 1. The managed platform meant to reduce lead-time & complexity of application deployment & infra provision 2. Developer Portal 3. OpenAPI tooling 4. Project Scaffolding (BE, FE, worker applications, with bundled CI/CD pipelines) 5. 30+ Libraries like our authentication, encryption, events (mostly adding functionality on top of open-source) 6. Local development tooling (abstracting away the docker compose file to start services locally for testing). 7. Tying all the above together into a cohesive developer experience. I've only been here for slightly less than 6 month, and learning the wide range of domain and products was quite challenging, despite coming from a technical background. I wanted to ask for those willing to share, how broad and narrow is your focus on a platform pm? I am going through the same struggles of any PMs juggling too many products, especially of different domains. I'm leveraging my developers as much as I can, but I feel to make a product decision, I would have to learn the lower level details anyways to be able to better understand the problem. 🙏

hi! yes this definitely resonates with me.. I support an IDP that sounds quite similar.. its quite 'wide' and 'deep'

I would try to not go to technical depth in such a situation - there are people who can do this, but they usually need help from a more strategic looking person, that can focus on the actual goals and outcomes the platform should achieve and tell them if they should actually build something or not. Probably @Marta Wozniak can frame that better than me 😄

I also come from technical background and it is true, it is hard to keep up with everything going on. The more PM strategic work you do, and more domains or customers you required to cover , the less you will know about platform implementation details.

Thanks everyone for sharing your experience with me and words of wisdom 🙏 🙂 Sorry for late response, as I missed the Slack notification of this workspace. So hypothetically , let's say that your company wanted to improve the lead time and stability of developing API's. Your engineers come up with a propose to adopt OpenAPI standard & tooling. How deep would you go (if at all) into learning what it does, the UX of annotating your controllers, writing OpenAPI spec, the code quality of the generated client and workflows/pipelines? Or would you typically stay more at the outcome/metrics level, looking at changes to lead-time and error rate?

The answer would be ” as much as need it and it depends” . In my case I could come up with a light spec with expectations and behaviors and reasoning we are using to prioritize it (problem), which I will review with tech leads refine, split and agree on scope and iterations to deliver it (solution)