Product Leaders playbook for winning at platform engineering

Platform engineering has evolved from a vague concept into a critical discipline, but many teams still struggle to prove its value and structure their work effectively. Understanding how to translate technical improvements into business outcomes is now essential for platform leaders who want to secure funding and organizational buy-in.

TL;DR: main insights:

• Platform product managers are now essential, with adoption growing from 3% to 30% of teams in just two years

• Proving platform value requires translating developer productivity gains into concrete dollar amounts that leadership understands

• Successful platform roadmaps must balance evergreen work (like "urgent care") with time-boxed projects, while buffering 30% capacity for firefighting

• Technical acumen matters more than technical expertise - platform product managers must ask the right questions and build conviction, not necessarily write code

Platform engineering teams face a unique challenge: they create immense value, but that value often remains invisible to the business leaders who control budgets. Julie Rupert, Vice President of Technical Product Management at JPMorgan Chase, has navigated this challenge across retail tech and fintech, proving platform engineering's worth in organizations where leadership initially viewed it as a cost center.

Sam Barlien, Weave researcher and co-host of PlatformCon, spoke with Julie about her journey into internal product management and the practical frameworks she's developed to win at platform engineering.
You can watch the full discussion here if you missed it: Product Leaders playbook for winning at platform engineering

From cost center to cost savings: The value translation challenge

When Julie joined retail tech in 2022, she encountered a problem many platform leaders face: leadership had "a foot out the door," viewing platform engineering as an expense rather than an investment. Google searches offered little guidance on what platform engineering even meant, let alone how to manage it as a product.
"As a business, you need to put it in dollars," Julie explained. "They didn't care about the developer satisfaction improving and all of these things."

This reality forced Julie to develop a concrete approach. Working with her principal architect, she built a value model examining three dimensions:

• Productivity: How much developer time does the platform save?

• Performance: How do platform improvements affect system efficiency?

• Resilience: What costs does the platform prevent through better reliability?

The breakthrough came from translating time savings into financial impact. "We took the average cost of a developer per hour and we said, okay, if our test parallelization improves speed by X every hour, what does that equate to in a year?" Julie described.

This approach produced a compelling headline: the platform engineering team saved $12.4 million annually just by existing, before accounting for any specific initiatives. When they added the value of their actual work, the total reached approximately $37 million.

"That conversion from being a cost center to cost savings was something very different," Julie noted. Leadership stopped questioning whether to fund the team.

The rise of platform product managers

Recent data from the State of Platform Engineering report validates Julie's experience. Platform product manager adoption has exploded from 3% of teams two years ago to 30% today - a tenfold increase that reflects the industry's recognition that platform engineering requires dedicated product expertise.

However, the survey also revealed concerning gaps. When asked how teams ensure a platform-as-a-product mindset:

• 15% have dedicated platform product managers and engineers with product mindset (the "star organizations")

• 38% have no platform product managers but claim engineers have product mindset

• 21% have dedicated product managers

• 25% have no product mindset at all

"The thing I was most struck by at PlatformCon was Luca's talk about the biggest miss that teams have, and that being a product manager," Julie said. "Product management is not something you just pick up. That's like saying, 'Okay, go code in React Native now.'"

The assumption that engineers can simply adopt a product mindset ignores the specialized skills product management requires. "Half of the job is the tech, half is the translation," Julie explained. "You go to the engineering teams, you understand what should I prioritize, and there's always going to be that dissonance - the tech wants this, the business wants that."

Building platform roadmaps that work

Platform roadmaps differ fundamentally from feature-based roadmaps, requiring a unique approach that many teams struggle to develop. Julie's framework addresses this by separating work into distinct categories:

Evergreen work includes:

• Urgent care (formerly "unplanned work") - approximately 30% of each quarter

• Standard operations - quarterly upgrades and maintenance

• App release velocity - ongoing improvements to deployment speed
  Time-boxed work includes:

• New architecture initiatives

• Major migrations

• Discovery phases for complex problems

The "urgent care" rebranding illustrates the importance of language in platform work. "We called it unplanned work until we decided that sounds like we're not prepared," Julie said. The new term better communicates that developers are blocked and need immediate attention, making it easier to justify the capacity buffer.

This structure helps manage stakeholder expectations. "Unlike standard product management outside of big tech, where it's like 'we're going to reduce this and this font is going to drive $5 million' - sure, sure - I wanted to make sure that it was based on something tangible," Julie explained.

Technical acumen versus technical expertise

One persistent misconception is that platform product managers must be former engineers. Julie challenges this assumption, arguing that technical acumen matters more than technical expertise.

"I'm not of the mindset that you need to code to be able to do this job," she said. "I am of the mindset that you need to ask the right questions and keep asking until you get the answers to build your conviction."
Her approach involves having engineers explain their work while she asks questions, then translating the technical details into business language. "I repeat it back to them and I just say, 'Have I understood?' I'm translating to business speak right now."

This translation capability proves essential when advocating for technically sound but expensive solutions. Julie described fighting for AWS multi-region support quarter after quarter, unable to quantify the cost of past outages because the company didn't archive that data. "When it went down just for an hour or two, that's all it took," she said. "I was going to be forced to deprioritize it. We were almost there."

Shared language and strategic clarity

Product management brings discipline around defining terms and building shared understanding. "A big part of product management is a shared language," Julie emphasized. "What are the key terms that we're using and are we using the same terms?"

This matters particularly in platform engineering, where terms like "friction," "blocker," and "test stability" can mean different things to different people. "When we say test stability, are we talking about qualitative, quantitative? And why do you have a different opinion than you?" Julie asks her teams.

The strategic discipline extends to roadmap prioritization. "Not everything makes the cut, and more often than not, something's going to miss out on the cut as the quarter goes on," she noted. Product managers must factor in business priorities while explaining trade-offs to technical teams who know certain solutions are optimal but expensive.

This balancing act requires both technical understanding and business savvy. "We try to do the right thing for the tech, the right thing for the organization, the industry," Julie said. "And that doesn't always speak in terms of dollars."

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Key takeaways

• Translate platform value into financial terms: Build models that convert developer productivity improvements, performance gains, and resilience benefits into annualized dollar savings. Leadership needs concrete numbers, not abstract benefits like "improved developer satisfaction."

• Hire dedicated platform product managers: The 10x growth in platform product manager adoption reflects industry recognition that product mindset alone is insufficient. Look for candidates with strong business acumen and technical curiosity, not necessarily coding skills.

• Structure roadmaps for platform realities: Separate evergreen work (urgent care, operations, release velocity) from time-boxed projects, and buffer 30% of capacity for firefighting. This structure manages stakeholder expectations while maintaining flexibility.

• Invest in shared language and strategic clarity: Platform product managers must establish common definitions for key terms and ensure all stakeholders understand not just what the team is building, but why it matters and how success will be measured.