For years, internal developer portals were hailed as the silver bullet for developer productivity – a central place where engineers could find all the tools, environments, and documentation they needed. These portals, often homegrown or pieced together, promised to streamline workflows in an era of exploding tools and technologies. But the ground has shifted. The complexity of cloud-native systems and the rising expectations of developers have exposed a hard truth: a portal without adoption is just another shelfware site. In fact, despite massive investments in tooling, many platform engineering initiatives struggle to reach maturity because the real problem isn’t technology – it’s getting developers to actually use the platform.
In this article, you will learn why the old “build it and they will come” portal approach is faltering, how leading organizations are shifting their platform engineering mindset to full product thinking, and practical steps to start evolving your platform team’s approach.
The Old Portal Playbook No Longer Holds Up
Not long ago, the prevailing strategy for managing engineering complexity was to launch an internal developer portal – a one-stop shop to consolidate tools, pipelines, and best practices. The intention made sense: with so many technologies in play, a central portal would reduce cognitive load and boost productivity. And indeed, most platform teams can technically build a sophisticated portal with robust automation and slick user interfaces. Yet many of these initiatives are failing to deliver value. Why? Because developers often bypass them. The harsh reality is that you can engineer the best internal platform in the world, but if developers don’t use it consistently, you’ve built “an expensive monument to engineering excellence that delivers zero business value.”
The old playbook assumed that once the portal existed, usage would naturally follow. But in practice, many internal portals launched with fanfare end up gathering dust. Developers find them clunky, incomplete, or not tailored to their needs, and revert to ad-hoc scripts or external tools. Simply curating tools in one place isn’t enough if the developer experience is poor.
Developers as Customers, Not Just “Users”
To change this outcome, platform teams are realizing they must stop thinking of developers as captive users and start treating them as customers. Words matter: if you see your fellow developers as passive users, you might be satisfied delivering whatever you build. But if you see them as customers, everything changes. Customers have choices. Your engineers can and will work around the internal platform if it doesn’t meet their needs – they’ll script their own pipelines, spin up shadow infrastructure, or cling to old ways. In the worst case, they’ll openly push back against the platform. This isn’t a tech problem; it’s a customer relationship problem.
Adopting a product mindset means acknowledging that internal developers “buy into” the platform only if it solves their problems and makes their jobs easier. Platform teams that succeed have embraced a fundamental truth: building a great internal platform requires thinking like a product manager, not just an engineer. This mindset shift starts with empathy and discovery. It’s not enough to gather requirements once and build in a silo. Just as a good SaaS product team studies its users, a good platform team actively studies how developers work day-to-day.
Instead of assuming what engineers need, successful teams spend time with them, watch how a code change goes from laptop to production, and identify pain points. They recognize that developer requests might hint at deeper issues (like too many manual steps or approvals). Importantly, these platform teams recognize developers are truly customers of the internal platform – they have a “job to be done” and the platform should compete for their satisfaction.
What does treating developers as customers look like in practice? It means shifting the questions you ask. For example, product-minded platform teams stop asking “What features should be built next?” and start asking “What jobs are developers trying to accomplish, and where do they struggle?” This customer-centric lens can be summarized as follows: developers don’t owe the platform their time; the platform has to earn their adoption.
Product Thinking: Feedback Loops over Features
Embracing product thinking in platform engineering means prioritizing continuous feedback and iteration. Just as successful B2B software products have tight feedback loops with their users, an internal platform should constantly gather input from its developer-users. That starts with communication, for example, by setting up channels for developers to suggest improvements or report friction, but it doesn’t end there. Leading platform teams instrument their portals and tooling to collect usage data: Which self-service workflows are used most? Where do developers abandon the process? What errors or delays occur frequently? By tracking such metrics, the platform team gains objective insight into where the experience is failing. In fact, focusing solely on traditional IT metrics (such as uptime and ticket counts) can obscure the true user experience. Measuring developer satisfaction and adoption alongside technical metrics is key, since a highly reliable platform that nobody likes is not a success.
Continuous improvement flows from these feedback loops. With real-time data and direct developer input, platform teams iterate just like an agile product team would. For example, if logs or surveys reveal that developers are consistently stuck setting up new test environments, the team can prioritize simplifying that workflow by adding a one-click environment provisioning feature. It’s no coincidence that some of the best internal platforms make the “right path” the easiest path, for instance, providing one-click deployment pipelines that handle all the compliance and security checks behind the scenes. The goal is to remove friction at every turn. In practice, this might mean condensing a five-step process into two steps or automating a frequent manual task, even if those changes seem minor – small user experience improvements can yield significant gains in developer morale.
A useful technique borrowed from product management is to ask different questions during planning. Platform teams that think product-first might pose:
“What job is the developer trying to accomplish?”
“Where do developers get stuck in their current workflow?”
“What would make a developer choose this internal platform over an external tool or manual workaround?”
By reframing the discussion this way, the team stays focused on outcomes and developer experience, rather than a checklist of technical features. And when in doubt, they go back to developers for validation – much like a product team would do a usability test or beta launch to get feedback.
Over time, these feedback-driven iterations create a virtuous cycle: better insights lead to a better developer experience, which drives higher adoption, which in turn yields more feedback and data to further improve the platform. This continuous loop is how some organizations manage to keep their internal platforms evolving in step with developers’ needs, rather than becoming stale legacy portals. Crucially, product thinking platform teams celebrate feedback (even negative feedback) as actionable data, rather than viewing it as “complaining.” The result is a platform that feels less like a mandated corporate portal and more like a product that developers themselves would choose.
Onboarding, Evangelism, and Lifecycle Mindset
Treating an internal platform as a product also broadens the scope of responsibilities for platform engineering teams. It’s not just about coding the portal or tools; it’s about managing the full lifecycle of the platform and the user’s journey. This begins with onboarding. When a new engineer joins the company or a team starts a new project, how do they learn about and start using the platform? A product-centric approach might involve creating quick-start guides, interactive tutorials, or even assigning “platform buddies” to new developers, ensuring that the first encounter with the platform is welcoming and productive. Just as consumer apps obsess over reducing time-to-first-value for users, internal platforms should aim to get a developer from zero to deploying code via the platform as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Next comes driving ongoing engagement, a role akin to developer relations or product marketing, but internally. Platform teams are beginning to evangelize their platform, hosting lunch-and-learns, showcasing new features at engineering all-hands, and highlighting success stories. This kind of internal advocacy may feel unnecessary, but in large organizations, it’s easy for developers to fall back on old habits. Proactive communication and education ensure that the platform’s value is understood and that teams know how to leverage new capabilities.
A product mindset also means planning for the platform’s evolution. Internal platforms are living products that will have versions, upgrades, and eventually deprecations. Rather than treating the platform as a one-off project delivery, organizations are establishing ongoing platform product roadmaps. They collect user feedback and factor it into quarterly plans. They set success metrics like developer Net Promoter Scores or the percentage of workflows onboarded to the platform. When features or tools reach end-of-life, they communicate clearly and help teams migrate. All of this requires organizational commitment, notably a dedicated platform team that isn’t just on call for break-fixes, but is also funded and empowered to continuously improve the platform. The platform team’s composition is also evolving – it may include a product manager for the platform and user interface or user experience specialists, reflecting the recognition that internal tools benefit from the same disciplines that customer-facing products do.
Finally, consider lifecycle thinking in terms of the developer journey. A developer’s experience with the platform might start at onboarding, but it continues through daily development work, and even to off-boarding. At each stage, applying product thinking uncovers opportunities to smooth rough edges. For instance, if a developer is troubleshooting a production issue, does the internal platform provide an easy way to find logs and metrics for their service (good developer experience), or do they have to navigate a maze of disparate tools? By mapping out these user journeys, platform teams can ensure their “product” supports developers not just in the happy paths but in edge cases and tough moments as well.
The New Platform Engineering Mindset
The shift from portals to product thinking isn’t just a feel-good story – it’s becoming a necessity as engineering organizations scale. The payoff for making this shift is substantial. When platform teams focus on developer experience and adoption, the business benefits compound. Developers spend less time fighting clunky internal tools and more time delivering features, accelerating time to market. Intuitive, self-service platforms also reduce support overhead because engineers can help themselves (and when they do need help, the platform team is already engaged with them via feedback loops, not operating as a distant service desk). Developer satisfaction goes up – and with a competitive market for talent, providing a frictionless internal developer experience can even aid retention and morale.
There’s a security and compliance angle too: when the official platform is easy and pleasant, developers are far more likely to use the blessed pathways, meaning your organization’s security guardrails actually get applied. In contrast, if the official path is painful, developers find workarounds and risk bypassing governance. A great platform product makes the secure, compliant way the easiest way, aligning everyone’s interests.
The most successful teams already understand that the real product isn’t the portal itself or the underlying tech stack – the real product is developer productivity and business velocity. Everything else (the portal UI, the automation scripts, the Kubernetes clusters) is just an implementation detail in service of that goal.
