Every company wants to build platforms. Few succeed.
The promise sounds irresistible: build it once, reuse it across teams, and move faster forever. But inside most enterprises, “platform” has become a buzzword attached to sprawling systems that no one loves and everyone tolerates.
Some of these platforms thrive because they are built with empathy and clarity. Others limp along as corporate mandates — used begrudgingly, updated reluctantly, and funded indefinitely. I’ve seen both ends of that spectrum, and the difference rarely comes down to technology. It’s about mindset, accountability, and whether platform teams remember who their real customers are.
A recent essay on Run the Business outlined seven myths about platform metrics — misconceptions like “all investments must have ROI” or “all metrics must be immediately measurable.” Those myths are true in spirit. Platform products do operate on longer horizons and indirect impact. But in practice, too many organizations misread that as a license to avoid measurement altogether.
Strategic patience is essential. But patience without accountability is just drift.
Where Platform Teams Go Wrong
1. Captive audiences breed complacency
Some platform teams serve customers who have no choice. Corporate IT decrees that “everyone must use Platform X,” and just like that, the internal users become a captive audience. Once that happens, the product mindset starts to erode. There’s no urgency to delight users, because adoption is guaranteed.
When usage is mandated, customer empathy evaporates. The roadmap becomes an exercise in compliance, not curiosity. The result is predictable: friction piles up, morale dips, and people quietly find workarounds outside the official system.
2. “Build it and they will come” rarely works
The other common failure mode is the opposite problem — a platform team convinced that their vision is so brilliant that adoption will happen naturally. They build, they launch, they celebrate… and no one shows up.
Internal platform teams are often insulated from real feedback loops. They don’t have to sell their product, so they never feel the pressure to validate demand. In those environments, platforms become imagined solutions in search of a problem.
3. Lack of empathy kills leverage
The most successful platform products I’ve seen are those that deeply understand their users’ journeys — developers, data scientists, marketers, or operations teams. They map pain points, run usability tests, and prioritize improvements that remove friction.
When platform teams operate this way, adoption becomes organic. Users advocate for the product because it makes their work easier. That’s the kind of success no corporate mandate can replicate.
Metrics Matter — But They’re Different
There’s a temptation to treat platform work as immeasurable. After all, how do you quantify developer velocity or architecture flexibility? It’s true that platform metrics look different from traditional product KPIs, but “different” doesn’t mean “optional.”
The trick is finding the right level of precision. If an initiative claims to “improve productivity,” that’s fine — but quantify it. Does it save teams ten hours a week? Does it reduce incidents by 30%? Does it cut onboarding time from three weeks to one?
Strategic patience, within reason
Some impact takes time to materialize. The Run the Business essay makes that point well: it can take quarters, even years, for platform outcomes to show up in business metrics. That’s why platform teams need leading indicators — adoption trends, usage depth, developer satisfaction, response times, cycle times — as early signs of value creation.
But patience should have limits. Every platform investment deserves an explicit hypothesis about the value it will create and a plan to validate that hypothesis over time. Strategic patience only works when it’s paired with deliberate measurement.
The Scream Test
One practical way to test whether a platform initiative really matters is what I call the scream test.
If you decided tomorrow not to build a feature or fund a capability, which customers would scream from the rooftops?
If no one would — not even your most engaged teams — that’s a red flag.
The scream test works because it forces prioritization. It surfaces who truly depends on your platform and whether the work you’re doing aligns with their pain points. Every platform leader should know who their “ten true fans” are, whether they’re individual developers or entire product teams.
If you can’t name them, your platform might be solving imaginary problems.
Treat Platforms Like External Products
Platform teams often ask to be treated differently from external product teams — longer timelines, fuzzier metrics, looser accountability. That’s exactly the wrong approach.
The best-performing platform organizations operate as if they’re running a business within a business. They understand their users, they compete for funding, and they report outcomes like a product with paying customers.
Feed your winners, prune your losers
If a platform investment is working — driving adoption, improving velocity, reducing costs — double down. If it’s not, wind it down.
That’s not cruelty; it’s discipline. There are always more problems worth solving than capacity to solve them. The sooner you redirect resources from underperforming platforms to high-impact ones, the healthier your overall product portfolio becomes.
Fund for value, not ideology
Enterprise teams often defend platforms as “strategic” even when the benefits are unclear. But strategy without results is just aspiration. Funding decisions should mirror how you’d treat external offerings: does it create measurable value for users? Is that value increasing over time?
Below is a simple way to reframe platform accountability:
| Dimension | External Product | Platform Product |
|---|---|---|
| User metric | Retention, NPS, MAU | Adoption, satisfaction, dependency |
| Value metric | Revenue growth, churn reduction | Time saved, cost avoidance, incident reduction |
| Quality metric | Reliability, performance | Uptime, latency, velocity |
| Risk metric | Market share loss | System fragility, integration risk |
| Engagement loop | Customer feedback, sales | Internal feedback, developer advocacy |
Treating internal users with the same respect as paying customers changes everything. It forces platform teams to deliver not just functionality but delight — faster onboarding, cleaner APIs, lower friction, clearer documentation.
Reframing the Myths
Revisiting the seven myths from Run the Business through a pragmatic lens helps clarify where the line lies between strategic patience and lack of accountability.
Myth #1: All product investments should have ROI
True — but ROI can’t be a checkbox exercise. Some platform bets fail, and that’s fine. The real issue is when ROI is undefined or unmeasured. Each initiative should have a thesis about how it drives leverage — in dollars saved, risks mitigated, or time returned.
Myth #2: All metrics should be measurable immediately
Correct — some take time. But that’s not an excuse to skip measurement. Break long-term metrics into leading indicators and track them with rigor. It’s better to measure imperfectly than not at all.
Myth #3: You need an impact metric defined upfront
Rigid metrics too early can stifle discovery. But having no success criteria creates confusion. Define hypotheses, then refine them as the product evolves.
Myth #4: PMs must own the metric
Shared ownership is healthy. Platform outcomes depend on collaboration across engineering, data, design, and go-to-market teams. But someone must still orchestrate accountability — that’s the PM’s role.
Myth #5: Platform metrics are less important
In fact, they may be the most important. In an era where AI accelerates feature parity, platform differentiation is what sustains advantage — through speed, reliability, and ecosystem effects.
Myth #6: All metrics should be easy to understand
Complex doesn’t mean irrelevant. The linkage between latency and customer satisfaction may be indirect, but it’s real. Leaders must learn to connect the dots instead of simplifying away the nuance.
Myth #7: Customers never ask for platform capabilities
They don’t — until something breaks. Uptime, performance, and scalability are invisible virtues. Customers rarely demand them in advance, but they define credibility when it counts.
Build It, Prove It, Earn It
Platform teams operate in a unique space — they don’t sell to external customers, yet their impact shapes every product the company builds. That duality demands a mindset shift.
Being a platform PM isn’t about evangelizing architecture diagrams or policing standards. It’s about building products that other teams want to use, not have to use. It’s about empathy, not enforcement.
Metrics can’t capture every nuance of that, but they can illuminate whether a platform is truly earning its keep.
So yes — strategic patience is necessary. But it must be balanced with measurable progress, user empathy, and the courage to prune what doesn’t work.
Because in the end, the platforms that thrive are the ones that operate like real products: they’re useful, loved, and constantly improving. And those that aren’t? No amount of patience will save them.