Eugenia Bergman and Hagen Tonnies share how they shifted from project- to product-thinking for their internal platform, presented at KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe. Key ideas include a producer–consumer model that makes team dependencies explicit through clear interfaces and contracts rather than recurring meetings. They redefined 'done' to mean a capability is integrated, documented, supported, and actually adopted by users. Progress is evaluated by asking 'Is this being used?' and 'Does it reduce friction?' Usage is tracked via API request volume, active consumers, and provisioning activity. Leadership support was framed as enabling experimentation and iteration rather than top-down mandates, with an 'organizational error budget' allowing teams to learn from missteps.
