维护平台 - 产品合适。

2011年，史蒂夫·伊格写了他的Google Platforms Rant，哪些州“平台的黄金法则是你吃自己的狗粮，”争论API对那些发展它们的人们依赖于他们的质量和特征覆盖范围。备忘录本周早些时候想到了与朋友的咖啡聊天，以借鉴他们的信念，因为谷歌云缺乏必要的功能，因为谷歌中的人们根本不在他们的云产品上建立。亚马逊，相反，他们的团队在AWS上广泛建立。

这些方法的发散结果可能最容易在各自的演变中看到Identity and Access Management提供。谷歌的IAM.从历史上提供优雅的界面，但对常见的Usecase等有限的支持，如子桶对象权限。亚马逊的IAM.skewed towards extreme flexibility, gleefully sacrificing comprehensibility for completeness. In my opinion. Google’s platform has become much easier to start on and equipped with better defaults for new projects, but remains difficult-to-impossible to operate on as a scaled enterprise user. (Results are also measurable在季度收入中。)

直接的同理心,如bui。真正的依赖你ld, remains the best vehicle to navigate the perennial tension in platform design between clarity and completeness. What I want to dig into a bit here is why this tradeoff is unexpectedly challenging for internal platforms. How do these internal platforms, created with their users sitting just a few desks away, suffer from a lack of user empathy?

Clarity in creation

内部平台致命，以支持公司的第一个主要业务。如果你是优步，那就是rive aring。如果您是谷歌，那就是搜索和搜索广告。这些初始平台建立在平台创建者和依赖于那些解决特定，相关和实际约束的平台的人之间的密切伙伴关系。

有罕见的新奇驱动发展案件，导致队伍误入歧途，但这些系统在其技术决策方面非常克制很大程度上很常见：实践技术贪吃的公司很少粘在足够长的时间里，以后悔他们的过度。定制功能仅存在于产品核心所需的程度。这种技术克制不是因为它代表了团队最纯粹的优秀技术的阐述，而是它是明确要求和时间紧张的函数。

早期系统是not完美但他们是完全适合业务的确切需求和限制，我有时会想到“Golden Age” software。随着时间的推移，由于公司扩大其产品线和the engineering team to support that expansion。

产品投资组合

Rapid expansion of the original product stresses the initial architecture, but the underlying platform requirements tend to remain相似的作为单一产品尺度。随着产品线从增长到价值的成绩，您将制定不同的权衡，也许在开发新功能方面强调生产力的高效运行，但许多平台要求将保持不变。

冒险支持公司的健康得到了评估discounted future cash flow, which requires both（1）持续高增长和(2)积极边缘的合理路径。This dynamic predisposes companies to a thrist for growth that’s rarely slaked by a single maturing business line, and forces them to expand into additional business lines that are either earlier in their growth curve (and consequently have more future growth upside) or thoes that are positioned for higher margins.

This expansion into a portfolio of business lines is a defining moment for internal platforms, who have to decide how to manage the tradeoffs between supporting a huge mature business that drives the majority of their revenue today against the needs of miniscule proto-products that ought to drive the majority of future revenue.

成熟产品强调稳定，安全，可预测的特征发展，建立高效的规模经济。早期产品需要快速迭代，广泛的勘探，用户验证，并将平台质量的大多数其他方面解释为摩擦。平衡这些独特产品队列的平台优先级不是一系列决定，而是一个持续的一系列决策一个迭代消除锦标赛。(If this sounds familiar, it’s theInnovator’s Dilemma。)

This transition from single product into product portfolios is a common juncture for internal platform groups to become misaligned with their users, as they struggle to navigate tradeoffs in an abruptly expanded可能性空间。

判断杠杆

大多数内部平台提供商的初始策略正在强制新产品，以与最成熟的产品相同的质量和品质，尽管它需要这种成熟的产品多年来迭代达到目前的细化水平。这对新兴产品产生了相当大的挫折感，因为他们往往将其销售给他们的角色，作为较大的公司内的“内部创业”，陷入风险和quality management mechanismsdesigned for problems years ahead of their current needs.

It’s tempting to blame clueless internal platform architects for this oversight, but I think that’s an overly convenient narrative. Instead let’s dig into the organizational incentives and constraints a bit. After all, these are smart people whose fundamental aim is to make other teams more productive, and the same anti-patterns emerge consistently across many different companies.

Internal platforms create indirect value for the companies and teams they support, which is much harder to measure than the direct business impact enabled by product engineering teams. However, platform teams often end up competing with the product teams they support for headcount, culminating in an attempt to tally the indirect against the direct in zero-sum tabulations. This direct comparison is challenging for internal platform teams on several dimensions. Not only is their impact more abstract, but senior company leaders are typically closer to the work of product engineering teams, and rather unfamiliar with the particulars of internal enablement efforts.

这可能导致令人沮丧的循环，其中产品系列的扩展隐含地增加了对基础设施团队的需求，随后产品团队在减少平台支持方面对领导的挫败感，通过逆行逆行，通过减少对平台团队的资金来回应。这个周期在每个产品团队中的尺寸尺寸的平台团队和出产的出现，贬低了公司使用技术的机会leverage point。Without platform leverage, internal work downshifts the fundamental unit of progressfrom working software to working hours。

经验丰富的内部平台团队已经看到此序列以前播放，并渴望避免这种令人沮丧的循环。许多平台团队的自然策略是通过将所有内部用户驾驶到一个公共平台来战斗杠杆侵蚀。这使他们能够最大限度地提高对用户的真实和默认的利用，将投资和支持集中到一个单一的界面，必然设计用于主要满足他们最响亮的用户的需求：成熟产品。

In this pattern, new product lines often struggle to drive new revenue and growth, as they find themselves trapped renters on a platform whose tradeoffs are inappropriate to the needs of early development. In the worst cases, these new product teams find themselves unable to plan or staff meaningful product development due to the stream of mandatoryplatform migrationsgenerated by the platforms need to maximize platform leverage to justify their own existence.

This is how companies missing a structured investment thesis for their internal platforms寻求租赁行为, even thought everyone involved attempting to rationally maximize their impact for the company at each step along the way.

投资论文和金色路径

当良好的意图不足时，故意讨论是下一步。任何在平台 - 产品契合中解决不平衡的尝试都应该从三个真理开始：

1. there is always be more demand for platform work than supply,
2. platform and product teams that compete head-to-head for headcount reach ineffective equilibriums,
3. 公司规模达到漫反射平台 - 产品要求。

我发现的两个工具在这里最有效地写作investment thesisand defining your金径。

一个investment thesisarticulates the extent to which you’ll support which product requirements over time. For example, you might specify 50% focus on the company’s core mature business, 30% on new product development, and 20% onunderlying platform quality。The thesis also articulates how you’ll staff these efforts.

对于人员配置，令人惊讶的有效格式是最简单的格式：识别在内部平台上工作的人与人之间的比率以及他们支持的团队的大小，并保持该比例。除此之外，Facebook已经让这一战略令人惊讶地取得了良好的成功。今年，您可以决定为每四个总工程师提供一个平台工程师，并在解决整体头部时使用该输入。

本文档非常强大，因为它提供了必要的约束，以级联进入下面的详细对话，这代表了规划中绝大多数价值。您可以独立地与每个业务行一起使用每个业务行，而不是争取更多的人员，而不是争论更多的人员，而不是争论。与用户合作工作以最大限度地提高平台投资的形状，他们的需求比争论广泛的笔触拨款更为有影响。

The other half is designing your金径，这是一系列可组合的接口和功能支持产品队列的要求。您希望您的接口可以在支持接口中的最小可能的曲面区域时适当地支持您的内部用户的许多内部用户。定期查看正在内部开发的新产品，并评估是否需要扩展功能或放松限制以服务它们。

With both, my best advice is to continue to frequently rethink your choices, and to随着你在短期内审议的时候，在长期休息时保持雄心勃勃。