I was curious to get some perspectives on product roles in Platform Engineering. I have seen Technical Platform Product Managers and Product Owners in this space are primarily focused on driving the discovery and design with Developers, Engineering Managers and Architects, building a self service internal developer platforms that extracts away the complexity and reducing the cognitive load for the developers and ultimately improve the speed to market and experimentation. Defining what a cloud based platform would look like (Container Orchestration Platform built on AKS/GKE or EKS, Observability Platform built on Grafana/Prom/Loki and so on), articulating value of these platforms and driving adoption seem to be some of the challenges in this space. Curious to hear other perspectives.

That broadly fits my own views on the topic - the 'marketing' and 'evangelising' side is one of my own blind-spots. Is that a TPO? The Architect? The whole Platform team? Who's out there with the developers shaking hands and kissing babies?

My view is that it takes teamwork but needs to be led by the TPO. I think it comes down to 1. is it really self-service platform, easy and seamless to onboard? 2. Are there enough forums to learn about these platform capabilities? 3. Is the value articulated well, compelling developers and other customers to leverage the capabilities? 4. Are early adopters promoting the platform with success stories? 5. Is the platform reliable and offered with its own SLOs? I am sure there could be many other strategies but I think these need to be designed and led by the TPO or TPM