What if we treated our fellow developers with the same care we treat our external customers? It’s a subtle shift in perspective, but treating our internal code, our platforms, and our APIs as “products” can fundamentally change the way we work for the better. This is at the core of Platform Engineering.
This idea has been so impactful that I’ve decided to explore it as a series. In this first part, we’ll start with explaining the reason behind it and some core concepts.
From Project to Product
The traditional “project” mindset often focuses on delivering a discrete piece of work and moving on, sometimes overlooking the long-term impact on developer productivity for future features. In contrast, the “product” mindset views code as a living system that requires ongoing care and evolution. When you treat code as a product, you’re not just shipping a feature; you’re taking ownership of a living system.
This means thinking about your users. In this case, your users are your fellow developers. What are their pain points? What would make their lives easier? How can you build something that they’ll not only use but enjoy using?
This user-centric approach is the heart of the “Code as Product” mindset. It’s about applying the discipline of product management to our internal development practices.
The Developer as the Customer
So, what does this look like in practice? It starts with empathy.
Consider Sarah, a developer tasked with setting up a new marketing campaign automation. Her goal is to build an automated marketing workflow that integrates with various internal and external services. Instead of facing a labyrinth of undocumented APIs and disparate systems, she finds a central workflow service built with a “Code as Product” mindset.
She finds the service written in a language she’s familiar with, and crucially, it comes with comprehensive guidelines. She quickly discovers how to add a new API endpoint to trigger her campaign, how to configure a new workflow that orchestrates email sends and social media posts, and how to manage dependencies. Best of all, the platform provides default observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and quality checks (testing frameworks, linting rules). This means Sarah can focus on the unique logic of her marketing campaign, confident that the underlying platform will handle the operational complexities and ensure reliability.
This experience transforms her task from a daunting integration challenge into a streamlined development process, making her productive and happy.
This story highlights several key aspects of treating code as a product for developers:
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Effortless Onboarding: When a new developer joins, the goal is to increase the confidence and reduce the time of their first meaningful contribution. This starts with choosing the language and frameworks that are most commonly used and easiest for new contributors to pick up, leveraging existing organizational knowledge. A great internal product then builds on this with clear setup instructions and documentation that anticipates their first questions. The benefit is twofold: the new developer feels productive and confident sooner, and the team gains a contributing member faster.
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Extensibility and the “Golden Path”: Beyond the initial setup, we need to think about common contribution patterns to existing services, APIs, or libraries. How do developers add a new feature to an existing service, extend an API, or contribute to a shared library? The “Golden Path” is about identifying these frequent workflows and building well-designed APIs, code interfaces, and clear guidelines to make these contributions incredibly simple and efficient. This isn’t about restricting creativity, but about removing cognitive overhead and ensuring consistency. By making the best way the easiest way, we free up developers to focus their energy on solving unique business problems, not on navigating complex or undocumented contribution processes.
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Testing and Reliability: A product needs to be reliable. For an internal tool, this means providing a robust testing framework. Developers should be able to add their own integrations and be confident that they haven’t broken anything. This means providing extensive unit and end-to-end test examples that they can build upon.
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Documentation as a Feature: Good documentation isn’t an afterthought; it’s a core feature of the product. We should document common patterns and provide clear examples. In an era of LLM-assisted code generation, this is more important than ever. Good documentation is not just for humans; it’s for the tools that should help us write code faster and more efficiently.
We’ve established the core principles of treating our internal code as a product. Now, it’s time to translate those principles into tangible practices. In the second part of this series, we’ll delve into the actionable steps for successful implementation.