Why treating users as customers increases platform adoption.
Every platform team is a "micro-startup" inside a company, understanding who their customers are and what painful problems they have should be their number one priority.
If the platform is built without user research or empathy for the application developers, it solves problems that don’t exist while ignoring the ones that do, leading to poor adoption.
Treating users as customers will allow you to achieve those results:
Onboarding users before the platform is built so they feel involved in the process, and developers will use a platform on which they contributed
Shipping your Minimum Viable Platform and building momentum
Getting valuable feedback quickly to know exactly what “features” to prioritize in the roadmap
The internal market
When you consider your user as “customer”, you value their input, you want them to be satisfied because you understand that your customers will pay you with:
their time,
their feedback,
their loyalty (to avoid shadow tooling being built without your knowledge)
Your customers are the Domain Experts
Here, I suppose your customers are the software engineers of the company, and they become “The Domain Experts” of their own domains, because only them knows what kind of applications they want to deliver in production.
Taking time to understand their workflow or their Jobs To Be Done, will develop a genuine empathy and allow for more proactive actions aligned with customer satisfaction.
Last but not least, a platform grows on Trust
Enforcing high-quality standards when developing the Minimum Viable Platform from the beginning is crucial to avoid losing the trust of your customers.
If next releases on your platform break Software Engineer’s velocity, increase the number of support tickets, you will lose the trust of your customers, and you will discover emerging patterns of behaviors aimed at protecting themselves against your platform’s regression. Your platform team will not be satisfied with it.
Your MVP’s technical requirements should be focused on:
reliability
predictable behavior
Get out of the building!
Steve Blank.
Each platform should be viewed as a “micro-startup”, even if you do not have to get out of the building (but maybe your “internal platform team”), you should recruit your first customers manually. Start with one team, one feature, and make them really happy to use your MVP.
What’s more joyful than to learn to build a product your customer really wants to use