The Usual Suspects of Platform Confusion

There's this unforgettable moment at the end of The Usual Suspects. The detective, proud of having outwitted the mysterious con man he's been interrogating, lets him go. But moments later, he looks around the room — really looks — and starts to connect the dots. Everything the man said was a lie. The clues were there the whole time. And then... he drops his coffee cup.

That moment — realizing you've been working from a flawed understanding — is one I've seen far too often in platform and product work.

When Product Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know

Here's the reality today: Teams work across layers of GitOps, Terraform, Helm charts, API gateways, and service meshes. Configuration and infrastructure are now code. But that code lives across dozens of repos, pipelines, dashboards, and cloud services. All of it is technically "visible" — but practically invisible to anyone not embedded in it daily.

And then, the team is asked:

• "How bad is it?"
• "Can we ship anyway?"
• "Can you just write a ticket for this?"

The engineers try to explain. They gesture at a network of interconnected abstractions. But from the outside — from the product perspective — it sounds... like a story.

The Coffee Cup Moment of Product Management

As product practitioners, we can't afford to operate on surface-level signals.

If we only look at status reports, Jira updates, or green pipelines, we risk walking out of the room thinking we've got it all figured out — when we might be staring at Kaiser Soze in disguise.

And just like that detective, we don't realize what's missing until it's too late.

We Need Better Frameworks — Not Just More Tools

This isn't about mistrust between product and engineering. It's about the lack of translation layers between deeply technical systems and the business decisions we're supposed to make with them.

What we need:

• Narratives that connect the dots between pipeline failures and feature delays.
• Context-aware status frameworks that don't flatten technical complexity into "done/not done."
• Visual systems that explain architectural bottlenecks without requiring a PhD in GitOps.
• Moments of alignment built into ceremonies — not as afterthoughts, but as product-critical checkpoints.

Working With, Not Around, the Abstractions

Infrastructure as Code. Configuration as Code. GitOps. These aren't the enemy — they're the future.

But they do create a reality where the truth lives in the layers. And if we, as product practitioners, don't learn to read those layers — or better yet, partner with those who do — we'll keep making roadmap bets on illusions.

Product's Role: Ask Better, Listen Deeper, Map Context

Our job isn't just to prioritize features. It's to build a shared understanding between the humans creating and those deciding.

To avoid the coffee cup moment, we need to stop asking, "Is it done?" and start asking:

• What dependencies are still unresolved?
• Where is the uncertainty hiding?
• What's the whole system context for this delay?

Because in this world of abstraction and velocity, the most dangerous assumptions are the ones that feel most true.