One day about 2.5 years ago, my manager said: "Congratulations, it's time for you to stretch yourself and lead 'Search Platform', and BTW the roadmap for H2 is due in 5 weeks." The Platform Team was the largest chunk of org engineering investment (80+ Engineers), and no one in Product or Leadership deeply understood what they did.
I frantically searched for resources and didn't find many good guides. Here are the different types of goals a platform team takes:
Goal Bucket #1: Efficiency & Reliability
Boring stuff, but business-critical. Any platform with some maturity level needs to be reliable & efficient at scale. Goals in this bucket are typically p0:
- Reliability: "Serving Platform uptime of 99.9999% for tier 1 partners, and 99.99% for tier 2 partners."
- Efficiency: "Complete migration from X to Y and save Z% capacity."
Goal Bucket #2: Joint Goals with Product Teams
The Platform exists for a reason — it serves product teams building user-facing features. Ultimately, any platform improvements need to ladder up to user-facing value: faster ship time, fewer resources, better end-user performance.
Contextualize goals: "Improvement in platform component X is responsible for Y% of the overall goal for the partner org."
Another flavor: add new capabilities by incubating them jointly with one internal client, showing value, and scaling them up across teams.
Goal Bucket #3: Platform as a Product
As the platform scales and has more internal clients, run the Platform more like a platform company. Increase adoption, run sentiment surveys with product teams, and improve on specific dimensions that are most important.