Comparison
Platform as a productvsSelf-service platform
Platform as a product
the platform team runs interviews, publishes a roadmap and measures adoption, because their users can always route around them.
Running an internal platform with product discipline — users, research, documentation, versioning, deprecation policy and voluntary adoption. The argument for it is that mandated platforms accumulate resentment and workarounds, whereas a platform teams choose is one that solved their actual problem. The practical test is whether the team could name their users' three biggest complaints without asking.
Full entry →Self-service platform
you got a database, a queue and a domain name by opening a pull request instead of by waiting four days for a ticket.
Letting engineers provision and change infrastructure themselves within guardrails, rather than through a request queue. It removes the platform team from the critical path of every change, which is what makes it scale, and it depends entirely on the guardrails being real — policy, quotas, defaults and audit. Self-service without guardrails is not a platform, it is an unbounded permission grant.
Full entry →