Eugenia Bergman and Hagen Tonnies shared at KubeCon Europe how their team transitioned from project-based to product-based platform development. The original project model led to one-off deliveries, no clear product vision, and weak feedback loops. Inspired by books like 'Project to Product' and 'The Phoenix Project', they shifted toward hypothesis-driven roadmaps, adoption metrics, and self-service infrastructure. Their developer platform now behaves like an internal cloud provider, exposing Kubernetes-native APIs, custom resources, and composable building blocks with clear separation between service, control, and management planes. The evolution was driven by growing multi-tenancy needs, AWS-influenced self-service expectations, and the need for clearer ownership and better abstractions.
