> It’s not supposed to work like this, but it plays out this way in many companies.
Absolutely, and I've been on both sides. We go much more with a carrot approach than a stick approach, and have no ability to "block" any product team from doing things. Our goal is to ship things that are useful and lower the effort required for product teams to ship their products, which is handling basically everything except product-specific features. However, product teams don't have to use the platform, but then they own the operational burden of whatever custom stuff they're using. When that happens, we still work with them to minimize that or bake that capability into the platform and eventually take it over if it's useful to the wider org.
"Success" of the platform team really depends on serving the product teams, so blocking or being a barrier goes very much against that. We try to provide opinionated golden paths, but also try to build a properly abstracted stack of capabilities so teams can also extend/consume at a lower level if that better suits their needs.
Absolutely, and I've been on both sides. We go much more with a carrot approach than a stick approach, and have no ability to "block" any product team from doing things. Our goal is to ship things that are useful and lower the effort required for product teams to ship their products, which is handling basically everything except product-specific features. However, product teams don't have to use the platform, but then they own the operational burden of whatever custom stuff they're using. When that happens, we still work with them to minimize that or bake that capability into the platform and eventually take it over if it's useful to the wider org.
"Success" of the platform team really depends on serving the product teams, so blocking or being a barrier goes very much against that. We try to provide opinionated golden paths, but also try to build a properly abstracted stack of capabilities so teams can also extend/consume at a lower level if that better suits their needs.