Treating internal platforms as products and using a Thinnest Viable Platform approach lets teams balance common tooling with unique business needs, reducing waste and scaling efficiently.
Platform engineering succeeds when you stop treating a platform as a one-off project and start treating it as an evolving product. The article argues that the real value comes from focusing on what is unique to your organization while standardizing the repetitive, non-differentiating work that every team faces, such as security configs, provisioning, observability and deployment pipelines. By abstracting these common concerns you free developers to deliver business value faster.
The author recommends a three-step mindset: first, identify the split between unique requirements and industry-wide needs; second, use commodity cloud services for the latter and build bespoke solutions only where compliance or business logic demand it. A Wardley Map is suggested to decide what to buy, configure or custom-build, with examples like HIPAA-specific infrastructure for health or PCI-DSS logging for finance.
Treating the platform as a product means adopting a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) to get early feedback, then iterating toward a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP). The TVP continuously strips away unused features and replaces custom code with commodity services, keeping the platform lean, maintainable, and scalable. The piece stresses that this disciplined pruning avoids the sunk-cost trap and maximizes the impact of a small platform team across many internal users.
Ultimately, the insight is practical: start small, align the platform with business goals, use product thinking and regular feedback loops, and keep the platform thin. This approach delivers faster development cycles, better compliance handling, and a sustainable scaling path for engineering organizations.
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