When the developers are the customers
I applied product discovery to the internal continuous-integration platform used by an engineering organisation of almost eighty people.
The internal product
Heetch was scaling a ride-hailing platform across markets. Its internal CI platform carried hundreds of deployments a week, making developer experience and platform reliability part of the product’s ability to move.
Finding developer friction
- I owned product direction for the developer platform and worked directly with the CTO, engineering managers and individual contributors.
- I shadowed engineers, mapped the developer journey and translated recurring friction into product priorities for the platform team.
Making invisible work visible
An internal platform has users, constraints and trade-offs, but its pain is easy to dismiss as engineering detail. The work was to make that experience visible and prioritise it without turning the platform into a collection of one-off requests.
What changed for engineers
- Developers spent twenty per cent less time interacting with the platform.
- The platform gained an explicit product perspective that balanced developer experience, delivery speed and reliability.
What I learned
I would establish product ownership and a baseline developer journey earlier. Internal platforms become critical long before organisations start treating their users and friction as product signals.
“I've had the pleasure of hiring and working with Pau twice, first at Heetch, where he joined as a Technical Product Manager, and later at Livestorm as a Senior Engineering Manager. [...] If I had the chance, I would hire him a third time without hesitation.”