A staff engineer’s guide to finding platform work
A practical model for product discovery in engineering-led platform teams, where there is no external roadmap to reveal the next highest-value problem.
Logged at IST: 2026-10-05 14:38 IST
What it is: Sujith Jay’s guide to how staff engineers in platform teams discover and shape valuable work when there is no product-led roadmap.
Gist: Jay suggests looking for signals from four places: systems, users, the organization, and the industry. Incidents and costs can reveal operational problems, but both have biases: incidents favor recent, loud failures, and a team’s own toil is not necessarily its users’ toil. User conversations still matter, but should be continuous and paired with observation rather than treated as a request queue. The larger task is to synthesize these signals into opportunities and revisit buy-versus-build decisions as context changes.
Why it matters: Platform teams can confuse available work with important work. This is a concrete discovery loop for teams that have to create their own roadmap while staying close to the people and systems they serve.