KubeCon Speakers Discuss Shifting from Project to Product Thinking for Platform Development

Transitioning to Product Thinking

At KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe, Eugenia Bergman and Hagen Tonnies shared their experience in moving from a project-centric to a product-centric approach for platform development. The core challenge addressed was ensuring platforms are understandable, usable, and adopted by their users, rather than merely being delivered.

Implementing a Producer-Consumer Model

A key change involved introducing a producer-consumer model to clarify team interactions. In this model, teams providing a capability are producers, and teams using it are consumers. This structure makes dependencies explicit, with producers defining clear interfaces and expectations, and consumers interacting through these defined interfaces instead of ad-hoc coordination.

Redefining "Done" and Measuring Success

The definition of "done" evolved from simply delivering a project according to scope and timeline to ensuring a capability is reliably used by others. This new definition includes integration into the platform ecosystem, documentation, support, operability, and actual usage by intended consumers. Progress is now evaluated based on user adoption and friction reduction, aligning development with user value.

The Role of Leadership and Experimentation

Leadership support was crucial, acting as an enabler for alignment, trust, and space for evolution. This support fostered a willingness to experiment, accept iteration, and recognize the fundamental changes required in planning, prioritization, and success measurement when moving from projects to products. An "organizational error budget" was also established to allow for exploring new approaches and learning from missteps without rigid expectations.