Opinion; Platform teams are internal product teams
To me, it seems obvious, you might read this and think it's controversial...
Platform, Cloud, DevOps (if you really have to call them that, that's whole different blog post) teams are not “Ops”. They should operate and be treated as internal product teams whose job is to solve problems that feature teams should not have to solve.
Their outputs are: paved roads, sensible defaults, safe abstractions, and boring reliability etc. All the things that let feature teams move faster without needing to become experts in infrastructure, CI/CD, security, or observability just to ship value.
Feature teams exist to drive revenue
Feature teams exist to deliver value to customers - that is what drives revenue and should be their primary focus.
That does not mean they should be ignorant of the platform. Quite the opposite. Feature teams should absolutely care about observability, CI/CD and operational behaviour. They should understand how pipelines work, how deployments happen, and how to debug issues when something inevitably goes wrong, because we want teams to operate independently and recovery quickly.
Understanding is not the same as ownership.
Optimise for focus
If a Product Engineer spots a way to speed up a pipeline or improve a shared tool, great. Open a PR, OR... Raise a ticket, (Github Issue, what ever the business process is) with the Platform team and let them take it on, so the Product engineer can go back to focusing on what matters to them.
The important thing is that Product Engineers should not be expected to continuously solve platform problems at the expense of delivering customer value.
A Product Engineer is an engineer who optimises for customer outcomes and business impact, not just code quality or technical delivery.
Where a traditional developer focuses on building features correctly, a product engineer focuses on building the right features.
Context switching kills productivity, and Platform work is never “just a small tweak”. Every hour spent wrestling CI/CD parameters is an hour not spent improving the product.
Platform ownership
When platform teams own the platform, and feature teams own features, everyone wins:
- Feature teams move faster with less cognitive load
- Platform teams build more coherent, stable systems
- The business gets more value, quicker
Build teams around outcomes.