Product teams regularly approach platform organizations with requests that make complete business sense. A team launching in new markets needs regional payment processor integration. Another team piloting a new discounting strategy needs a new incentive construct. A third team building an enterprise offering needs custom invoicing capability. These requests are well-scoped and clearly valuable. Yet platform teams must frequently decline them, not because the request lacks merit, but because the platform roadmap is already full of other higher-priority features and capabilities.
Product teams, meanwhile, operate under different constraints. Revenue targets do not adjust for platform capacity. Market launch dates were set months ago. Pricing experiments that could move key metrics cannot wait two quarters for platform prioritization.
This familiar impasse stalls innovation, forces product teams into costly duplication and pits business priorities against engineering reality. While various collaboration models exist (Team Topologies describe interaction modes, or embedded platform experts), these assume the platform team either has capacity to prioritize the work or that product teams should proceed independently.
