Platform as a Product Vocabulary — Exercises

1 / 5

When an engineering organisation says it treats its internal developer platform "as a product", what does that primarily mean?

Correct: B. "Platform as a product" means the platform team operates with the same rigour as an external product team: identifying who their internal users are, defining and measuring user journeys, running feedback cycles, and maintaining a prioritised roadmap — rather than delivering whatever was most recently requested.

Approach	Characteristic
Ad-hoc tooling team	Builds tools reactively; no user research, no roadmap, no adoption metrics
Platform as a product	Proactive roadmap, defined internal users, satisfaction measurement, adoption tracking

2 / 5

A platform engineer says: "Our internal customers are primarily the six stream-aligned teams."
Who are "internal customers" in this context?

Correct: B. "Internal customers" maps the concept of product customers onto the engineering teams inside the organisation. The platform team treats these teams as customers: it must understand their pain points, communicate change clearly, and earn their continued adoption rather than mandating usage top-down.

Customer type	Who they are
Internal customers	Engineering teams inside the org consuming the platform to ship their own products
External customers	End users or businesses buying the company's commercial product

3 / 5

A platform lead reports in a quarterly review: "Our Developer Experience NPS is +34 this quarter."
What is being measured?

Correct: B. Developer Experience NPS adapts the classic NPS survey question — "How likely are you to recommend this to a colleague?" — to the internal platform context. It provides a single number from -100 to +100 summarising developer satisfaction at scale. +34 is a healthy score: the platform produces more promoters than detractors.

NPS range	Interpretation
Below 0	More detractors than promoters — significant platform friction
0–30	Acceptable; broadly useful but with meaningful pain points
30–70	Good; developers broadly satisfied with the platform experience

4 / 5

In a platform quarterly review, the team says it is "stuck at the trial stage of the adoption funnel."
What does this mean?

Correct: B. The platform adoption funnel mirrors external product adoption: Awareness → Trial → Active Use → Advocacy. Stuck at Trial means teams are interested enough to experiment but are not crossing into regular production use — typically a signal of friction in onboarding, reliability concerns, or insufficient demonstration of business value.

Funnel stage	What it looks like in practice
Awareness	Teams know the platform exists; attended a demo or read the docs
Trial	Running test workloads; exploring capabilities without production commitment
Active use	Platform used regularly for production delivery
Advocacy	Teams recommend the platform to peers and new joiners

5 / 5

A platform team announces a "golden path" for container deployments.
What does golden path mean in platform engineering?

Correct: B. A golden path (also called the "paved road") is the platform team's recommended, actively maintained approach to a common engineering task. Following it means benefiting from tested defaults, thorough documentation, and full platform support. Deviating is allowed but puts the team outside the support boundary. It embodies the principle: "make the right thing the easy thing."

Concept	Key property
Golden path	Opinionated defaults, maintained by platform team, lowest setup cost, full support
Off-path / bring your own	Team-owned configuration; maximum flexibility, no platform support guarantee