Usually user feedback drives priorities. For platform is it development teams as user. Or really product end user? How does this all connected?

It’s true that platform teams serve many different types of users. I like to define the platform mission as “building tools for customers, developers, and internal teams to extend the product in a self-service way.” While you do need to understand different personas, at the end of the day, all of your users are still united in trying to solve for the end customer. With that lens in mind, user feedback is still driving priorities. The only difference is it’s coming from multiple sources:

• Customers: For simpler solutions that can be solved in the product UI, you can gather feedback directly from customers and deduce what they’re trying to do. Often you’re able to provide a solution that will solve for the majority of use cases and customers can build the solutions themselves. 

• Developers: For more complex solutions that are often unique to the customer, it’s not possible to offer a general solution in the UI since it wouldn’t make sense to the rest of your customers. That’s where developers come into play. Developers are like business partners who help build solutions for customers. They’re often a great source of knowledge of customer needs and can help inform your product roadmap.

• Internal teams: Internal teams are another key stakeholder since they will often ask you to build something their team needs. Unlike external customers, you cannot dodge them and will need to give them an answer or they’ll harass you on Slack :) In this case, you can still ask for a business case (combination of customer feedback and data) to understand the priority. So in the end, you’re once again prioritizing based on customer feedback.
  

Once you’ve gathered customer feedback across all three sources (customers, developers, internal teams), you then can prioritize your roadmap and determine what solutions to build for the highest impact.

Great question. In short, platform teams mainly focus on serving internal users (commonly developers) with essential building blocks that fast-track development and offer consistency with end-user UX.

Let's use Identity & Access Management (IAM) as an example. As a company introduces a new product, the development team behind it will need to ensure users can securely authenticate and manage access. What IAM offers is a standard company-wide engineering framework for how external users (your customers) authenticate across different company products and how your development teams integrate with this service in a consistent yet secure manner.

Depending on where your Platform capability is within the technology stack, Platform PMs could have a different level of exposure to end users while their internal user focus remains unchanged.

When thinking about the user input when prioritizing (amongst many inputs) there are some questions to answer. Here are some, but not all, of the ones I think about when new requests come my way.

• What is your customer (the person or group using the platform) trying to do or solve for and why?

• How is that thing your customer is building solving the end user need?

• How does that contribute to the overall goals for the company?

With these in hand for all the requests coming your way you an prioritize amongst those for what really will impact not just your internal users but the end customers and drive business results.

You may even find that there are efficiencies and improvements you can drive for the end users that your customers have not surfaced to you.