Infrastructure as Product is not a slogan, it is a reset on how we ship platforms that people actually want to use.
Teams that carry the platform title are moving from ticket takers to **product owners** who ship **features** for internal customers, measure **adoption**, and run **feedback loops** with the same energy that growth teams use for user funnels, and that shift changes daily work for **developers**, **SRE**, **security**, **data**, and **marketing ops**; the playbook looks simple on paper: treat the platform as a product, own a backlog, publish a clear **roadmap**, hold yourself to **SLAs** and **SLOs**, and ship **docs** that reduce time to first success, yet the habit that makes it real is the weekly loop where platform folks sit with teams, watch someone try to deploy or wire a data feed or set a consent rule, and log the paper cuts in plain words that become stories this same week, no excuses, because a platform that needs a concierge is not a platform, it is an internal agency with a different badge and that model does not scale; this is why **golden paths** and a **developer portal** matter so much right now, since they turn intent into a guided path and let talent focus on the app, not the yak shave, and if you want names, think **Backstage** for service catalogs and tech docs, **Terraform** and **Crossplane** for cloud resources as code, **Kubernetes** for runtime with guardrails, **Argo CD** or your favorite Git driven deploys, and monitoring with **OpenTelemetry**, **Grafana**, or **Datadog**, all wrapped with a layer of **self service** that is signed by security and blessed by finance through clear **showback** and **FinOps** rules that keep cost visible at the pull request; the point is not the tool list but the **product thinking** behind it, since tools move fast while the product habits last, so you pick small slices with an **MVP** approach, land a working path for one team, learn, ship to the next, and publish the learnings in the portal like release notes for your platform, and yes, you will say no often, because the power of a platform is the paved road, not every road, which is why naming the standard and keeping it boring is an act of service to feature teams who just want to ship.
On the marketing and martech side the same story is unfolding, since content ops, data pipelines, and measurement stacks need the same **platform care** to keep pace with creative demands, privacy changes, and the slow goodbye to third party cookies that Chrome is rolling out in phases, and the teams that treat **tracking**, **consent**, **server side GTM**, **CDP flows**, and **feature flags** as a product are giving their growth partners a sharper tool with fewer surprises; if your marketing stack still lives on a wishboard of vendor stickers you probably feel the pain every launch week, since each campaign becomes a one off, while a platform view lets you define a few **golden events**, a trusted **catalog** of data sources, an allowed list of tags, a tested process for **A B tests**, and a playbook for rollback, and the result is faster cycles and fewer awkward calls when a pixel spikes page load or a consent rule is misread by a plugin, so yes, **marketing** benefits from the same **platform engineering** mindset that product teams are adopting and it is better to share the base than to run parallel tracks; the best sign that you are on the right path is when copywriters, analysts, and engineers talk in the same room about outcomes, not tools, because the platform is a shared service they trust, and a shared service earns trust when it ships well, speaks clearly, and answers with data.
What does day to day look like when you run **infrastructure as product** and want results without ceremony, start with a one page **north star** that names a clear user and a painful moment you aim to remove, example: new services reach production safely in under thirty minutes from repo create to first request, or net new data sources reach the warehouse with a tested schema and consent tag in less than a day, then list three key **KPIs** that tie directly to that pain, like time to first deploy, percent of teams on the golden path, and number of rollbacks where the platform was the root cause, or for martech the share of events that pass validation, the number of campaigns that ship without manual tag changes, and the time to publish an experiment; build a backlog from field notes, not from a dreamboard, and ship in small batches that users can feel this week, then close the loop with release notes and a short form feedback form that can be answered in one minute, keep all docs close to the work in the portal, not in a wiki graveyard, and make the first screen a set of jobs to be done rather than a map of your org chart, since people come to the platform to finish a task, not to learn the drawing of your team; give **support** the same care you give production, with clear handoffs, office hours, and a bot that surfaces docs and status pages in chat, because the shortest path to trust is quick, honest responses when something hurts, and yes, own the **incident reviews** when the platform is at fault and publish the fix like a product change log, the goal is not zero incidents, it is a culture where incidents shape the road; price your platform with **showback** that is readable, not a spreadsheet puzzle, so teams see the cost of choices and you can guide the move to the golden path with numbers rather than memos, and bring security and finance early to sign the path, since a platform that fights with control teams will stall, while a platform that codes their **guardrails** is a friend that ships faster and safer; teach with short videos or workshops that end with a working outcome, and partner with a handful of teams as champions, since social proof inside a company beats any deck, and for visibility share a public **roadmap** and hold a monthly demo hour where anyone can raise a hand and ask for a tweak, this is how you keep the loop alive; on tools keep a lean base, avoid surprise drift, and put **defaults** in code, not in slides, with templates that create repos, pipelines, and alerts ready to go, and make the easy path the safe path, since friction invites forks and secret scripts that crumble later; for **governance** write rules that are testable, like policy as code with checks at pull request time, because rules that only live on paper turn into folklore, while checks in the path turn into muscle memory that nobody argues with after the third pass.
If you want a simple checklist to start on Monday, here is a small one you can copy and bend: say who your users are in one sentence and publish it on the portal front page, write three user jobs as buttons that point to the golden paths, define your first three KPIs and publish the current numbers even if they look rough, set a weekly office hour and keep it, pick one pain and ship a fix each week, publish release notes every Thursday with a human title and a one line why, move your docs next to the action, like templates and forms that run rather than walls of text, and hold a monthly demo with five minutes per team to show what the platform helped them finish; on the martech side, get your event catalog in one place, define names and rules in plain words, set up server side **GTM** with guardrails, pick a small set of **consent** states with clear mapping to tags, define your first A B test path end to end with a rollback button, and measure the friction from idea to live, because that number is the halo for your platform; tie all of this with **DX** practices like short starter repos, a one command local run, and a starter pack for monitoring, and for cost put a small card on every service page that shows spend and a pointer to the cheaper path if a team wants it, since money talks even on internal tools and a clear view drives smart choices; none of this needs a big bang, you can start with one page and one path, then add a second, and if someone asks for a custom fork ask why the base cannot serve it, log the gap, and fix the base first, since every fork is interest you will pay later.
If you are a marketer reading this and thinking this sounds like engineering chores, I would invite you to see the upside, because a shared **platform mindset** lowers the tax you pay on every launch, keeps consent clean, and turns boring plumbing into a promised service with **SLAs**, status pages, and a clear who to ping when something blips, which means more time shaping stories and less time chasing tags; if you are an engineer thinking this sounds like product work, that is the point, since your users are internal teams and they deserve a platform that treats their time with care, not a maze of forms and tribal knowledge, and the people who ship infra with a product voice become force multipliers for the whole company; this week there is a lot of buzz on **platform engineering** posts, **Backstage** plugins keep popping up, **Crossplane** keeps growing, and Chrome keeps pushing cookie changes, all of which add noise, so coming back to first principles helps, find the job, pave the path, measure the time, and talk in public inside the company so trust has a place to grow; the companies that do this will ship more often with fewer scary nights, and the folks who work there will have more calm days, because the platform will feel like a product they enjoy using, not a maze they avoid until the last minute.
Build the platform you wish you could buy, speak to your users every week, and let the feedback loop be your product manager.