Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

Anyone here having to serve two roles: Platform Lead and Platform Product owner?

My title is Lead Software Engineer but I currently spend more time managing the product than engineering (also architecting solutions). I don't have much background and am trying to learn.

How big is the organization your platform is serving? How many users do you have, How many applivations running on the platform?

60 engineers engaging directly in the platform another 60 people who are consuming services through interfaces tied to the platform. The platform is in the gaming space so users are variable, but anywhere between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Backend has automated horizontal and vertical scaling with containers etc, so that part is actually easy.

It is basically a platform for Massively Multiplayer games. So all these users interact in the same space, but various clusters service various games, as well as shared services. My team does not build individual services except for what we need. The engineers deploy dozens of services and have self-serve to deploy what they need.

In that scale I would have fight for two separate people doing two separate roles 

Here you can check where I would draw the line between Engineering and Management: <https://khalasa.com/2024/10/platform-engineer-vs-platform-manager-role-skills-difference/|https://khalasa.com/2024/10/platform-engineer-vs-platform-manager-role-skills-difference/>

Yea that is the rub. That is not an option. Hiring freeze.

I said as much with our tech director recently. Basically our engineering department has never had a product owner of any kind. Me and one of the other leads do most of it. The best hire engineering can make is a product manager from outside the games industry, since all games industry PM's only care about game features.

Maybe a calculation effort-vs-value will help?
Playing those two roles at the time has it’s consequences. If you need help calculating the argument, DM me (I make my living calculating business cases now and managing devops consulting unit - but last 5 years I played a Platform Manager role, even publishing a course about it)

It sounds like you have 120 engineers engaging with your internal developer platform;  are you being pulled into defining the platform strategy, architecture design/decisions while managing/prioritizing the new features to focus?  If so, is there someone else on your team that could handle more of the ownership while you focus on the future?

<@U06EHCM8281> I am the strategy, architecture, designer, and lead engineer of the platform. I am also a people manager. I work in the video game space, so the roles that would traditionally support me do not support me. The industry is completely feature focused and they only hire product managers and designers who want to do game stuff. So tech teams like mine are totally neglected.

As for my team, I don't think so. Two are contractors I inherited (they are good, but not engaged at all, clock-in clock-out mentality). The other two guys I have I don't see filling those roles. One is already a one-man ops team and firefighter, the other would need a lot of training and I don't see them wanting to do that kind of work anyway.