You build it, you run it” is great... until you’re running yourself into the ground, firefighting while your roadmap stares back at you like an unfinished novel 😶‍🌫️ Calling on this brilliant band of platform product wizards 🧙*:* We’re a lean team managing hundreds of environments, stuck between “we need to innovate” and “we need to keep the lights on.” What I’m dying to know: 1. How do you organize your teams to escape the reactive grind and focus on strategy? Any of you own a mix of platform and service-oriented scope? 2. How “hands-on” are you as PMs? Are you in the weeds (technical details, JIRA subtasks) or flying high (PRDs, epics)? 3. External customers vs. internal platform—how do you settle that tug-of-war? 4. Any magic tricks to unlock bottlenecks and stop letting ops hijack the roadmap? I’m looking for the hacks, scars, and unconventional wisdom that come from living with constraints. What’s worked for you when “the book” wasn’t enough? Thank you in advance for your stories! 🙏

What my colleague @Marta Wozniak has posted on LI might fit - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mdwozniak_recently-ive-been-reflecting-on-my-experiences-activity-7269613941494853633-0lfy/

Thanks Jay! Yeah it won't hurt to speak up, find other overwhelmed people but go beyond venting together (although it is helpful!) and listen to what they think could help, then try to make it happen for all of you. And translate everything possible to money, either saved or earned, to align with the business as much as possible. Here's another relevant read (although brief and the promised link to more is missing 😭 ), it's about product operations but the insights are transferable to platform engineer space: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jennywanger_product-ops-is-not-about-shipping-particul[…]349453496324-4I7f?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop The process shown in the link above explains that reactive mode is a natural starting place for many enabling teams! from my experience you'll need a buy-in from whoever is pushing the work your way to try and do something else. How do you do that? either you're already listened to or you'll have to prove yourself - figure out the smallest valuable thing you can achieve even with current workload and show the results. This relates to your no 2, you need to make yourself redundant in a day-to-day to drive strategic initiatives - either delegate more to teams if possible, automate, or consciously drop the ball on some things if you know there are other more impactful things to be done. The last one is risky and depends on your company culture but sometimes it's the only way and sounds like you're on a straight way to burnout (raising frustration without power to improve the situation) 😕 What worked for me was to highlight the negative consequences of the current situation, how if we just keep doing what we're doing we'll drown as a company, and convinced my manager to amend the way we prioritise work and become much more critical about any new ticket - but I had a good relationship, he appreciated the honesty, and I kind of already proved my value before attempting that. Also it's not "done", it's really easy to fall back to old habits, and staying on a new direction is still a lot of hard work.

#1: introduce old fashioned, decent software analysis. Your software is a Platform. Your customer is dev teams :) explained here a bit: https://khalasa.com/2024/01/how-to-approach-internal-developer-platform-delivery/ #2: I am 0% hands-on, on purpose (hard to do being an engineer and spent most of my live being a hands on person). Here is why: https://khalasa.com/2024/10/platform-engineer-vs-platform-manager-role-skills-difference/ - also, scale of platforms and strategic topics are time consuming. But, I use engineering techniques to approach strategic topics :) those are also problems to be solved, just on a higher level. #3: … maybe two teams, two products with a shared fragments of code? #4: exercise value stream mapping - together with ops and dev :) in the same room, onsite. Online does not work in such situations, they need to build a relationship to understand each other.