A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work

> Platform teams are engineering-led rather than product-led. There is almost never a product manager handing you a roadmap, no revenue line to follow, and no market to lose. It's precisely because of this framing and mentality that platform teams don't actually serve people well and are usually highly dysfunctional towers of people inventing work. The fix for having no market is to act like the teams you serve could leave. This whole article lists signals, and none of them is that. Being captive does not mean the users or internal teams don't have other options and don't notice. Being product-led means caring about your users. A platform teams should be product-led, not engineering-led in that very narrow meaning. Otherwise you invent work as this article so wonderfully exposes.

> The continuous struggle is to find ways to increase the value our platform provides to the users of the system. IME as a staff+ platform engineer*, it is dead obvious what increases user value. What is truly challenging is building a story around why anything should be worked on at all, when platform sits the furthest from customers. I previously worked with a seasoned PM from FAANG who had low technical chops but somehow placed themself in the final decision maker seat for platform work. They relentlessly blocked work that I described repeatedly in details: data quality was hurting, latency was dog shit, etc. But “bad data model? What do our customers care about our data model and pipelines that are confusing to maintain?” It wasn’t until I showed some basic charts about our core database being oversubscribed and at risk of a more serious incident. At that point, we finally had the same understanding of the problem at the highest level and I was granted (lol) approval. This admittedly took me almost a year to figure out. Others just trusted my judgement. The takeaway for me was really good tho. Even technical people probably don’t know wtf is going on in your domain, and metrics gets everyone on the same page, because numbers and charts are easy to understand. * Platform is used too broadly so hard to say what the author exactly means by this.

"that work does not exist unless an engineer invents it." This is so strange. To my mind the only purpose companies hire engineers is to support business. The staff engineer should not need a project manager to tell what is interesting for business aspects - even though the goals are likely mostly technical. I do realize this does not hold up always. But to me if you can't provide some reasoning for your work in business metrics you are participating in an academic exercise.

"inventing work" = "requirements engineering" "Inventing work" is a strange phrase to use imho.

I use the "what's going to kill us next" philosophy. Figure out what that is and do something to avoid it. Wash, rinse, repeat.