Platform teams don't have a prioritization problem. They have a stakeholder problem.

The typical product team serving an end customer has a clearly defined customer. They usually have defined segments, like personas, and know where to focus their efforts. Platform teams that don't serve end customers have a harder time defining their customers.

When defining where their focus should be, they get caught between stakeholders from security, compliance, architecture, internal developer teams, and many other interest groups. All of them approach the platform team with their perspective. And all of them are colleagues with direct access to the team.

This gets reflected in the team roadmap and backlog. If everybody is a customer, nobody really is. As a result, we don't see a clear direction. Instead, we see a collection of tasks that won't accelerate platform adoption.

In the first article of this series, I discussed the challenge that many platform teams fall into the "expensive request taker" trap. They are not seen as a cash-positive team but rather as a cost center that many other teams are unfortunately depending on. The request-taker mode quickly leads to over-indexing on prioritization frameworks and time-consuming dependency management. As a result, they spend more and more time in meetings and lose the time to discover and build.

Treating everybody as an equal input is the root cause of constant direction changes and overall mental overload. This article helps address stakeholder complexity for platform product managers and other roles leading platform teams.

The stakeholder mess

Most product teams know this reality: Every day, they are approached by people with ideas, requirements, feature requests, and dependencies. And who can blame them? Every stakeholder has their own incentives and needs, and it's not their job to make the trade-off decisions for the product team.

For customer-facing teams, this challenge is resolved by focusing on a specific customer segment. A product manager might cut through the noise by asking: "And what do we think this will mean for the clinic operators in our target group?" Priority discussions can be led by what's best for this single customer group.

For platform teams, the landscape is messier. Customer-facing teams push for faster feature delivery, while security demands architectural changes, and the compliance officer is waving at pressing regulatory changes. All while leadership is moving resources to "more mission-critical" initiatives. Every stakeholder is focused on their immediate needs, and the platform team is by definition caught in the middle.

It's not surprising that many platform teams fall into a request-taker mode and become mostly reactive. Strategic direction is hard to establish when every stakeholder is treated equally and "the customer" is every colleague interested in the platform or service.

Start differentiating stakeholders

To escape this mess, the team has to differentiate between groups of colleagues. Understanding their different motivations and treating them accordingly is a key skill for platform product managers.

Start by collecting and visualizing these different groups in relation to the team. A stakeholder map helps discuss how influential each group is, how they relate to one another, and other factors that inform interactions with these groups.

Creating a stakeholder map with a team is an easy exercise. Put a sticky for your platform team in the center. Add stickies for each group or representative who interacts with the team. As a team, position them at distances that feel right. Naturally, you will also discuss the relationships between stakeholders. The whole exercise doesn't aim to create a scientific view. The goal is rather to foster a discussion and to create a differentiated stakeholder awareness.

After all stakeholders have been collected, add key drivers to each. Answer what they need and what they expect from the platform team. Include both functional needs and emotional drivers. For example, imagine a CEO who is focused on efficiency but also super nervous about the risk of data breaches, even though it's unlikely to occur. The goal is to list a few key points that describe the stakeholders' perspective.

Three helpful angles to understand stakeholder requests

To better understand what stakeholders are truly looking for, I like to take a variety of angles to understand their direction.

Consumers

This group is nearly equivalent to customers and users. These are your internal developers or teams utilizing your platform. They use or integrate the platform's output, whether it's an API, SDK, pipeline, GUI, or another interface. They're directly affected by what the platform offers and how it's provided.

Mature platform teams monitor adoption, developer satisfaction, and similar metrics to evaluate the success of their platform. If their consumers struggle to use the platform's capabilities, it's an obvious source of improvement potential.

To influence adoption rates and satisfaction, it's essential to deeply understand the current workflows and actions of consuming teams. The foremost way to focus a platform team's efforts? Define specific metrics for consumer behavior. Then improve them.

In short, product discovery activities must focus on consumers. If they fail, the platform will fail.

Influencers

Influencers shape platform direction, formally or informally. They typically hold titles such as CTO, VP Engineering, Product Lead, Architecture Lead, Head of Business Unit, and similar leadership positions.

This angle additionally includes colleagues with informal political or functional power not defined by the org chart. For example, think of a finance analyst who becomes the go-to person for cost modeling decisions, even outside their formal responsibilities.

Consider that not all influencers are directly connected with the team. A head of growth might steer the business model to new sales channels that require a different platform strategy. Indirect influencers are often unaware that their decisions have significant ripple effects.

But not all influencers are a drag for the platform team. Some are sponsors of the platform. Especially direct leaders have a strong interest in maintaining funding for the platform and therefore might need specific results. Others in the organization can also be direct or indirect sponsors of the platform's mission.

Influencers' actual job is to care for the bigger picture, and platforms need to understand and enable these goals. Long-term decisions, such as the technology stack, architecture approach, buy-versus-build decisions, and the overall business model, can significantly influence a platform team's workload, especially compared to other teams.

The key to not being caught by surprise or even working against these streams is to develop a deep understanding of their perspective and incentives. Many influencers only get involved in platform decisions when the platform blocks delivery timelines or creates operational blind spots. Keep influencers in the loop for major decisions and stay on top of understanding their direction. Additionally, they are an important input for de-risking viability decisions.

Governance

The third big group is governance. Colleagues from this group might have security, compliance, regulation, legal, or any other authority-invoking item in their title. These stakeholders bring external or internal rules that impose constraints or require additional capabilities.

Even if many rules sound like non-negotiable requirements that must be implemented in a very specific way. They usually don't describe how to implement a solution. It's important to understand the underlying intent these rules and laws address and the implicit trade-offs they entail.

Colleagues from this group are happy to support efforts to satisfy these regulations without being a burden to the business or to other colleagues. Especially, colleagues with a law background love to help interpret the details and find new, creative ways in the specific context. Their goal is not to be a necessary evil, but to prevent long-term harm from the business and the wider society.

These angles provide an additional lens for differentiating among stakeholders. In some cases, they will overlap. For example, a compliance group can be the expert on the rules (governance) and also use the platform to enforce or monitor compliance in a specific area (consumer).

With this differentiated landscape, the team can interact with each stakeholder appropriately by understanding their real needs. Only by combining these perspectives can platform teams make defensible trade-off and prioritization decisions.

Using stakeholder differentiation for creating focus

Understanding different stakeholder viewpoints is essential for developing a successful platform value proposition, which serves as the foundation for priority decisions. On the surface, the organization might just want a platform to provide a paved road for compliant deployments. But if consumer needs aren't met, adoption will fail, and the platform won't deliver the expected efficiency results.

Understanding how consumer demand works and what makes platform usage the obvious choice naturally focuses the platform team and shapes priorities. For example, GDPR applies to the entire organization and is not optional for any team. A platform can ensure compliance by default rather than placing the burden of custom implementation on every team. When the platform aligns with the team's development cycle, it's an obvious decision to use it. At the same time, the governance officer has a much simpler way to monitor adoption.

Another benefit of being deeply invested in stakeholder needs, especially regarding consuming teams, is that seeing what they build reveals emerging patterns. When you see the same pattern across teams, like in authentication, rate limiting, and data pipelines, that's your signal to platform it. This generates efficiency gains, enables additional teams to re-use functionality, and simplifies technical architecture.

The missing piece

Understanding stakeholder perspectives is key to defining the value proposition and defining priorities. But as in customer-facing teams, simply following demand is only half the equation. The other half is to optimize for the business side. Without a clear business rationale, even a consumer-focused platform team can fall into the cost-center trap.

In the third part of this series, I will provide a guide for connecting stakeholders' demands with the business rationale.

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