How to Build a Product Platform People Will Want to Use

A Practical Guide for Product and Digital Leaders

In this earlier article, we clarified what a platform is: A reusable set of capabilities that helps multiple teams build better, faster, and more consistently.

But knowing what a platform is doesn’t make it easy to build one.

In fact, platform efforts often fail.

Why?

• Because they’re treated like infrastructure projects instead of products
• Because they’re designed without real users in mind
  
• Because they’re built once, funded once, and never evolved
  
• Because teams are told to use them, rather than wanting to use them
  
  

So, how do you avoid that?

How do you build a platform that becomes a true enabler — something people want to integrate, use, and build upon?

This article lays out a practical roadmap for doing exactly that.

Step 1: Start With Patterns, Not Technology

Great platforms don’t start with code. They start with noticing patterns.

Before you write a single line of code or spin up a team, take time to ask:

• What are multiple teams building over and over again?
  
• Where do different products rely on the same data or logic?
  
• Which user journeys are supported inconsistently across the org?
  
• Where do teams spend time solving the same problem in slightly different ways?
  
  

You’re looking for repeatable problems. These are your raw material.

Examples:

• Three product teams each have a different login flow
  
• Data scientists across regions are building similar churn models with different inputs
  
• Every new feature requires its own manual onboarding flow
  

These are not isolated inefficiencies. They’re signals that a platform opportunity exists.

What to do:

• Interview 4–6 teams across domains (product, data, design, engineering)
  
• Map out shared workflows, logic, or dependencies
  
• Identify the 2–3 highest-friction, highest-potential areas for reuse
  

Step 2: Treat the Platform as a Product

This is where most platform efforts go wrong. They’re managed as back-end technical initiatives, not as user-facing products.

A real platform needs everything a product needs:

• Clear value proposition
  
• Defined users and use cases
  
• A roadmap
  
• Success metrics
  
• Continuous feedback and iteration
  
  

Barb Wixom’s research on data platforms makes this point clearly: the best data capabilities are run like products, not IT systems. That means real ownership, budget, and accountability.

What to do:

• Appoint a product owner for the platform, not just a tech lead
  
• Create personas for your internal users (developers, analysts, integrators)
  
• Define the problem the platform is solving
  
• Create a backlog and prioritise based on internal demand and strategic goals
  
  

Tip: Start with one or two anchor use cases that matter to the business. Don’t try to build for everyone immediately.

Step 3: Make Integration Easy

If using your platform is harder than building from scratch, people will build from scratch. Every time.

Ease of adoption is everything.

This is why developer experience (DX) is so important in platform work. Your first customers are your colleagues — and you need to win them over.

What to do:

• Provide high-quality documentation, sample code, and usage guides
  
• Offer onboarding support, walkthroughs, or office hours
  
• Create SDKs or helper libraries where possible
  
• Build a sandbox or test environment for safe experimentation
  
• Track time-to-integrate as a metric
  
  

Real example: At a fintech firm, the internal identity service didn’t get traction until the team built a “plug-and-play” setup script. Integration time dropped from two weeks to two hours. Adoption took off.

Step 4: Build for Reuse, Not One Team

It’s tempting to build for your most vocal stakeholders — but a true platform has to support variation, not just repetition.

That means designing capabilities that are:

• Configurable
  
• Modular
  
• Decoupled from specific business logic
  
• Abstract enough to serve multiple domains, but not so generic they’re useless
  
  

This is harder than it looks. It takes time, consultation, and iteration. But it’s the difference between building a tool and building a platform.

What to do:

• Identify your top 3–5 consumer personas or teams
  
• Test early prototypes with each to ensure flexibility
  
• Avoid hardcoding rules that apply only to one product
  
• Build governance models that allow for input, extensions, and variation
  
  

Tip: Document not just how to use the platform, but also how to contribute to it.

Step 5: Fund It Like a Product Line, Not a Project

Most platforms fail not because they’re badly designed — but because they’re underfunded or abandoned after initial delivery.

If your platform truly matters, it needs stable investment and resourcing over time.

That means shifting away from project-based thinking and toward product-line funding. You’re not building something once. You’re building something that improves with use.

What to do:

• Build a platform business case focused on internal efficiency, speed to market, and reuse
  
• Set adoption targets and track ROI (e.g. dev hours saved, duplicated tools retired, speed of onboarding)
  
• Present a multi-year value vision to execs, not just a delivery timeline
  
• Create a lightweight but recurring governance forum to manage backlog and stakeholder input
  
  

Step 6: Lead the Cultural Shift

This is the most important part — and the hardest to fake.

Platform success is not just a technical outcome. It’s a cultural change.

You’re moving from teams working in silos to teams working on shared foundations. That takes trust, clarity, and incentive alignment.

Your job as a leader is to shift the narrative:

• From “We built it, you must use it” to “We built it so you can move faster”
  
• From “Central control” to “Federated enablement”
  
• From “Our team’s product” to “Our organisation’s capability”
  
  

What to do:

• Celebrate teams who adopt or contribute to the platform
  
• Share success stories widely (e.g. “Team X delivered Y% faster using Z capability”)
  
• Build internal champions across product, design, and engineering
  
• Reward reuse in performance reviews, planning sessions, and OKRs
  
  

Final Thought

Building a platform isn’t just about architecture or tooling.

It’s a leadership decision about how you want your organisation to scale.

Do you want every team solving the same problems repeatedly?

Or do you want to solve core problems once — and help every team move faster as a result?

The best product organisations are platform organisations.

They invest in shared foundations. They treat internal users like real customers. And they measure success by how fast others can build on what they’ve created.

That’s the shift.

That’s the work.

And it’s worth doing right.