Make Your Platform a Product
Context
Big companies often become platform companies before they look like platform companies.
- Microsoft sells software, but Azure is also a platform.
- Google sells search, but GCP is also a platform.
- Amazon sells retail, but AWS is a platform business on its own.
The pattern is simple: if other teams or outside developers depend on your infrastructure, your APIs, or your tooling, your platform can become a product.
Bezos' Mandate
In Steve Yegge's rant on platforms, he describes the internal memo Jeff Bezos sent at Amazon in 2002. The core idea was blunt:
- All teams must expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
- No direct reads, no shared databases, and no back-channel communication.
- Every interface should be designed so it could be externalized later.
That decision pushed Amazon toward the service model that eventually became AWS.
Operating income is the profit left after operating expenses such as wages, depreciation, and cost of goods sold. - Investopedia
Make Your Platform a Product
Your platform does not need to be your company's flagship product for it to be valuable.
Stripe is a good example: the product is an API for payments, and that API became a business on its own. Reddit and Twitter also exposed external developer APIs so other people could build on top of their systems.
The real question is not "Can we build a platform?" It is "Should we turn this platform into something other people can rely on?"
That is worth doing when the platform creates leverage for developers, strengthens the core business, or opens a new market. It is not worth doing when the surface area would distract the team from the main product or create support obligations you do not want.
