Stop Renaming Teams, Start Product Thinking: A PM's Guide to Platform-as-a-Product

Everyone’s talking about treating platforms as products. But when your platform team is drowning in tickets, firefighting upgrades, and struggling to prove ROI, “just apply product thinking” sounds like advice from someone who’s never run a platform. And let’s be honest: slapping a “Product Owner” title on someone and renaming your ops team won’t magically fix anything.

So what does actually work? I’ve spent 5 years as a Platform Product Manager figuring that out. One example: transforming an internal monitoring platform from “universally avoided” to revenue-generating in 1.5 years—now serving 150+ Kubernetes clusters. The shift isn’t magic. It starts with asking better questions about who your users really are, what value looks like, and how to prioritize when everything feels urgent.

In this talk, I’ll share a framework that helped me make that shift—moving from thinking about technical components to understanding your actual platform users. You’ll learn how to visualize what your platform really is and derive value metrics that prove impact beyond “uptime” and “tickets closed.”

Whether you’re a platform engineer curious about product thinking, or a team lead trying to escape the “internal service desk” trap, you’ll leave with practical starting points to treat your platform as a product—for real.