We previously featured platform engineering product teams in Adopt as a good way for internal platform teams to operate, thus enabling delivery teams to self-service deploy and operate systems with reduced lead time and stack complexity. Unfortunately we're seeing the "platform team" label applied to teams dedicated to projects that don't have clear outcomes or a well-defined set of customers. As a result, these miscellaneous platform teams, as we call them, struggle to deliver due to high cognitive loads and a lack of clearly aligned priorities as they're dealing with a miscellaneous collection of unrelated systems. They effectively become just another general support team for things that don't fit or that are unwanted elsewhere. We continue to believe platform engineering product teams focused around a clear and well-defined (internal) product offer a better set of outcomes.
