Platform-as-a-Product Research

[Rotfuks]

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Motivation

As we have learned in the Platform Engineering Maturity Model seeing your developer platform as a product is a significant sign of the maturity of your platform. But how does product management actually work with a developer platform and what tools and patterns are successfully used by platform leaders and builders? 

We have a lot of assumptions around those questions, but in order to deliver an helpful guide that empowers other organisations to elevate their platform maturity by using proven product management patterns and tools, we have to put in some research and prove - or disprove - our assumptions.

Work Issues

These are the different items we need to work on in order to complete our research:

• [x] #548
• [ ] #549
• [x] #550
• [ ] #551
• [ ] #552
• [x] #553
• [ ] #652

Hint: Our work progress so far can be found in this research document.

Outcome

As a first goal of this research initiative we first want to learn.
We want to learn what tools and patterns successful platform leader and builder use to manage their platform as a product. 
We want to learn what potential challenges other organisations might face in their platform engineering maturity journey when productizing their platforms and how they can overcome them. 
We want to learn, (if and) why successful platform teams productised their platform and what opportunities lie within introducing product thinking in other organisations. 

As a second goal of this research initiative we want to share what we learned: 
This can be in the form of another WG Platforms Whitepaper, Best Practice Guides, Blog Posts, Talks or any other contribution that might empower other organisations to follow in the footsteps of leading Platform-as-a-Product success stories.

[loujaybee]

Quick one @Rotfuks, there is a the other, very related issue: https://github.com/cncf/tag-app-delivery/issues/457 do you think we need both of the issues still? I guess the other is more about a whitepaper than the research, but did want to point out the duplication and link the issues.

[Rotfuks]

Hmm good point @loujaybee - that ticket still seems to be pretty valid for what we're doing there. And I even commented there, so I should know it! :laughing:

This one was the outcome of a discussion around the next steps for the initiative and how to formalise and make the work more transparent in the scope of our working group. 
The other ticket sure has way more text to go through - but it also with that has all the context and the action items that we're listing here. What do you think @mluskind, should we keep this "smaller" epic here or use the original whitepaper one?

[Rotfuks]

Just talked to @mluskind, yes makes sense to close this as a duplicate and put some effort in the original ticket where people might already watch for updates. Thanks for the heads up! 
And sorry @abangser for closing it while you just labeled it :heart: :laughing:

[Rotfuks]

After a short checkin with @mluskind and looking at the plan of the couple of new issues we're creating here we decided it would be a better approach to use this as a dedicated ticket for the now streamlined effort that we're aiming for in this research and close the other here linked epic with the outcome of forming the initial platform-as-a-product research group and setting the topic and scope of the research we will conduct within the scope of this epic here now. Soooo, reopening it :)

[joshgav]

Thank you for opening this, the way you've laid out the work to be done and linked other issues is quite helpful!