Arrested DevOps · Matt Stratton, Trevor Hess, Jessica Kerr, and Bridget Kromhout

Everything's a Product With Sarah Morgan

August 10, 2023·51 min·4 clips

A product manager reveals why most teams ignore reliability and stability in their user experience.

The premise starts sideways. Matt frames the conversation around work people may not automatically file under DevOps, then the excerpt lands on product thinking for teams that do not look like classic feature teams. Operations work does not sit still. SRE and operations groups get pulled into interruptions and incidents, which makes the tidy future-facing roadmap from feature-team life feel a little fictional. That changes the management problem. A feature team can usually name its users, gather inputs in one place, and point toward a cleaner product future. Platform teams rarely get that clean a setup. The conversation treats the ambiguity as the work, especially when internal platforms get rebranded under the platform engineering banner. The Heroku analogy helps. If an internal developer platform is meant to feel like Heroku inside a company, the team building it has to think like a product team while still living with operational constraints. Public SaaS has a harsh feedback loop. If customers do not show up, the business has a problem, so value, usability, and adoption get painfully visible. Internal platforms are murkier. The users are inside the company, the incentives are tangled, and the platform team may have to argue harder for what users need. Matt keeps it practical. He connects the point to a recent platform engineering conversation with Daniel Bryant and uses that shared context to frame what platform engineering is trying to do. The episode is not selling a framework. It asks what changes when product thinking meets incidents, internal customers, and a platform that only matters if developers actually use it. Sarah closes with practical whereabouts, pointing listeners toward KCDC and the Telemetry Rehab YouTube channel. That fits the episode: practitioners trading field notes, not polishing slogans.

As heard by us

A practical DevOps conversation about platform teams treating internal tools like products people still have to choose.

Everything's a Product with Sarah Morgan frames platform engineering as a product discipline, not just an infrastructure concern. The useful move is the SaaS comparison: if Heroku has to win customers because those customers have alternatives, an internal platform team cannot…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Hear why internal platforms matter only when developers actually choose them.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Arrested DevOps