Product Thinking for Cloud Native Engineers

Developers can more easily describe value through features built, customer reach, and outcomes. Operations teams often struggle to demonstrate value because their work is characterized by stability and lack of failures. Product thinking for engineers emphasizes making value visible and connecting engineering efforts to stakeholder goals. In large organizations, engineering teams work with multiple stakeholders, including finance and business, alongside developers. Platform experience teams manage infrastructure platforms while coordinating across different groups. Product management backgrounds can support platform engineering by treating platforms as products and helping others build platforms that deliver clear value.

"We realized that for the developers it's pretty easy to say that this year I've built this, this, and that, and it's reached that many customers and so on. For operations people it was like, it worked, nothing broke. We realized how much more difficult it is for operations people to show which value they're bringing compared to people who are building something. This was the inspiration for today to show to engineers how to better work with value."

"I'm going to start with an anecdote I had a few years ago. I was working at that time for a consulting company and we had people, had customers, some were doing development, some were doing more operations. At that company we had performance reviews where you talk about the performance of everybody who is in the department. We realized that for the developers it's pretty easy to say that this year I've built this, this, and that, and it's reached that many customers and so on."

"My name is Stéphane Di Cesare. I work for the DKB, so the Deutsche Kreditbank. This is one of the largest online banks in Germany with about 5 million customers. I have an engineering background. I work in the platform experience team. We have an infrastructure platform, and in the experience team I'm working with the different stakeholders or the developers and also people like finance, business, all kinds of stakeholders."

"I'm Cat Morris. I'm Staff Product Manager at Syntasso, but originally, I was a failed engineer. I wasn't very good at it, but moved into product management pretty soon afterwards but never really left the engineering domain. I worked on internal tooling, MTL engines, things like that, before moving to Thoughtworks where I worked in their enterprise modernization platforms and cloud team. All about cloud migration, how do we do platform engineering. I specialized in product management and Platform as a Product as part of that."

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