Product-Manage the Platform Team From the Side
Frustrated by a slow internal platform team? Supply the product management they don't have
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Fournier's advice to product teams stuck depending on a platform team that is slow, unresponsive and seemingly unaccountable. Rather than routing around them or undermining them, diagnose the actual cause — usually that the platform team has no product manager and therefore no idea what to build — and fill that gap from outside. Anchor on the parts of the team that already work, and lead them from the side.
Origin
Camille Fournier, responding to a former colleague's complaint that platform teams are slow, force feature compromises, and get infinite funding with no ROI. Her answer draws on the same thesis as her book with Dean Nolan: platform teams fail because nobody is product-managing them.
Core principles
- 01Undermining or avoiding the platform team may work long-run but makes everything worse in the short run.
- 02The frustration is usually valid — many platform teams genuinely don't listen, don't deliver effectively, and don't explain their value.
- 03A platform team with no PM is a room of smart engineers building whatever they think is right. That's a gap you can fill.
- 04Frustration is not a strategy. Clarity about what you need is.
- 05It cuts both ways: if a platform partner drives you crazy, you almost certainly drive them crazy too.
- 06Some part of the platform team is working well. Find it and build on it.
How to run it
- 1
Understand their problems before making demands
Spend real time understanding what the platform team is actually constrained by, and try to collaborate rather than escalate. This is the price of entry for everything that follows.
Watch out Getting angry, avoiding them or trying to undermine them poisons the relationship you'll be depending on for years.
- 2
Find and amplify the part that works
Identify the sub-team that is genuinely good — maybe the databases team is excellent. Maintain a strong relationship there and be able to point publicly at how well you collaborate with that part of the platform org.
Pro tip A visible success story with one sub-team gives you credibility and a template when you ask the rest of the org to change.
- 3
Check whether they have a PM at all
Many companies won't fund product managers for internal teams. If there's no PM, the team's incoherence is structural, not malicious — and that changes what you should do about it.
Pro tip This diagnosis is the pivot: it turns 'they're incompetent' into 'they're unmanaged', which is a solvable problem.
- 4
Supply the product management yourself
Give them explicit product feedback: here are the problems we have, here is what we need, here is what you should be building. The clearer you are, the more you can lead them from the side.
Pro tip Fournier is blunt that this is annoying and shouldn't be necessary — but sometimes your job is to product-manage the platform team.
Watch out Get over the anger first. Product feedback delivered as a complaint gets filed as a complaint.
In the wild
A colleague working on customer-facing products regularly complained to Fournier that platform teams are slow, push product teams to compromise on features to adopt their systems, and get infinite funding without ever having to show ROI. Fournier says she's very sympathetic — and also notes that she has no doubt he drives the platform team just as crazy as they drive him.
→ Rather than validating the escalation instinct, she redirects him toward collaboration, anchoring on the working sub-teams, and supplying the product direction the platform team is missing.
Her concrete tactic: within a frustrating platform org, find the parts that are good — perhaps the databases team is awesome. Keep that relationship strong and be able to demonstrate the collaboration is working there.
→ You gain a proof point and a credible position from which to ask for change elsewhere, instead of a blanket grievance.
Common mistakes
Routing around the platform team
Avoiding or undermining them might eventually work, but it makes the short run worse for everyone and destroys the relationship you'll still need afterwards.
Complaining instead of specifying
'You're slow and I don't know what you do' gives the team nothing to act on. 'These are the problems we have and this is what we need' gives them a roadmap.
Assuming bad faith rather than missing product function
A platform team building strange things is usually one with no PM, not one that doesn't care. Misdiagnosing that leads you to escalate when you should be helping them prioritise.
Is it for you?
Best for
PMs and product engineers whose roadmap depends on an internal platform team they find slow, opaque or unresponsive.
Not ideal for
Situations where the platform team already has strong product management and the disagreement is a genuine prioritisation conflict — or where you have no ongoing dependency on them at all.
From the transcript
“look find the parts of that team that are good because I'm sure there are some”
“sometimes your job is to product manage them is to tell them like these are the problems that we have and this is what we…”
“try to just get over the like anger and frustration and just be clear about what it is that you need”
From the episode
The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand
Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at