Product for Internal Platforms - Camille Fournier

This resource first appeared in issue #26 on 29 May 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other, Strategy: Product/Service Management

Product for Internal Platforms - Camille Fournier

This is an article written for tech companies about how easy it is to go off the rails developing the enterally-used tech platform for developers. It holds a lot of lessons for research computing (software, systems, or data) though. The traps you can fall into are the same, because you are developing tools for a small, captive audience. It’s too easy to lose track of what a broad range of “customers” need to succeed:

When platform teams build to be building, especially when they have grand visions of complex end goals with few intermediary states, you end up with products that are confusing, overengineered, and far from beloved.

Recommendations:

  • You still need to be customer focussed
  • Partner with diverse users as often as possible
  • When making changes, plan user migration strategies early
  • Don’t build when you don’t have to
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