Product Management for Internal Platforms

The purpose of internal infrastructure and data platforms is to enable teams to spend more time with solving the business problems of their domain instead of dealing with infrastructure impediments. While such platform teams exist since the advent of the DevOps movement, only in recent years companies started to see the value of treating them as products and their internal stakeholders as users.

However, many established product management practices are hard to apply when you are developing internal platforms. Usually your audience is captive and too small to do any A/B testing. It’s hard to quantify success if you are reducing the opportunity costs of rework or the unavailability of data. And often you need to carefully balance between standardization and governance and enabling teams to move fast and autonomously.

In this talk we will share concrete examples of how we approached and sometimes even solved these problems for HelloFresh’s internal platforms. You will learn where established product management practices can be applied, where they need to be adopted and where we found that completely new approaches were needed.