Encourage Your Platform Engineers To Talk To Their Users

If your company practices platform engineering, having your platform engineers talk to their users is important.

Here’s why:

You need to be able to empathize with other engineers. It’s easy to work on new tools based on perceived pain points when you’re working in a silo. You’ll end up wasting time building tools that nobody will use.

I’ve found it super useful to pair with engineers to see problems and challenges through their eyes. This helps me gain context and gather feedback.

Having the proper context and feedback makes it easier for me to prioritize work that will make our engineers’ lives better.

Building an internal platform for engineers should be treated similarly to building product for customers. Your stakeholders are other employees instead of customers.

You probably wouldn’t build features that customers aren’t asking for, so why would you do the same for internal customers?

---