The Hidden Lever for Platform-Product Operating Model Success: Define the Operating Contract

Across the industry, we’re seeing organizations restructure their delivery models around platform and product teams.

The idea is compelling:

• Product teams, aligned to business value streams, focus on business outcomes.
• Platform teams provide the underlying capabilities that power those outcomes.

But in practice, it rarely works as intended - not because the model is flawed, but because we haven’t made the operating model real enough.

One helpful metaphor: think of platform teams as landlords and product teams as tenants.

• Platform teams provide the building: infrastructure, utilities, safety, shared services.
• Product teams lease space, configure it for their business needs, and focus on serving customers.

This isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a model for how delivery should work. Just like landlords and tenants need a lease agreement, platform and product teams need a clear, co-created “working agreement” that outlines roles, responsibilities, support, funding, and decision-making.

• Product teams are aligned to business value streams — like onboarding, claims, servicing, and lending. They’re usually funded by the line of business, focused on delivering outcomes, and measured by customer or business KPIs.
• Platform teams are shared services, often run by enterprise technology groups. They build capabilities that serve multiple product teams across different lines of business and back-office functions — think identity, DevOps pipelines, data platforms, integration layers.

Product teams deliver value vertically, platform teams deliver capabilities horizontally. If you don’t explicitly define the relationship — you get gaps, duplication, and tension.

What’s in a Good “Platform–Product Lease Agreement”?

Like any good lease, the agreement should be mutual, transparent, and enforceable.

Here’s how the metaphor maps to enterprise delivery:

• Rent and utilities --> Internal cost allocation, usage tracking, chargebacks
• Landlord services --> SLAs, uptime commitments, onboarding and support models
• Maintenance responsibilities --> Who fixes what? Who owns reliability and support?
• Renovation permissions --> Change control, upgrade coordination, and breaking changes
• Eviction or deprecation clauses --> Sunset timelines for unused capabilities
• Tenant input --> Platform backlog prioritization and product feedback loops

You don’t need lawyers in the room — but you do need a shared understanding of how the relationship works, and what’s expected on both sides.

The Problem Most Organizations Face

Many transformations stop at the structural level:

• Teams are renamed “platform” and “product”,
• Reporting lines shift,
• Vision decks are built.

But execution struggles:

• Platform teams get swamped with one-off requests,
• Product teams feel blocked by inflexible shared services,
• Business leaders lose confidence as delivery slows.

The root issue? There’s no operating contract between platform and product teams. And without that, the model collapses into silos, ambiguity, and duplication.

What Good Looks Like: Sample Operating Contract

 Making It Real: The Operating Model

Here’s what we’ve seen work in real-world transformations:

• Service Catalogs and APIs - Not Slideware: Platform teams must treat internal teams like real customers. Define what services are offered, how to request them, what SLAs apply, and what the roadmap looks like.
• Intake and Escalation Models: Product teams should never be guessing how to get platform support. There needs to be a formalized intake process - for feature asks, incidents, escalations, and feedback.
• Shared Governance Forums: Set up regular governance forums where platform and product teams jointly make decisions - around standards, funding trade-offs, and roadmap priorities.
• Shared OKRs and KPIs: Align both sides on shared objectives - time to market, customer NPS, reuse rates, platform stability, developer productivity - and incentivize collaboration.
• Executive Sponsorship and Enforcement: Leaders must reinforce the behaviors that make the model work. That includes pushing back when product teams go rogue, and supporting platform teams to build with reuse, not reactiveness.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

• Over-engineered platforms: If a platform team builds services no one uses, it’s wasted effort. Build what’s needed, and evolve with demand.
• Shadow IT by frustrated product teams: If the platform doesn’t deliver fast enough or clearly enough, product teams will build their own versions - leading to fragmentation and tech debt.
• Misaligned incentives: If platforms are rewarded for stability, and products for speed, you create a structural tension. Fix the incentives.

Real-World Impact

When this model works, we see:

• Faster time to market due to standardized, self-service tooling
• Higher system reliability due to consistent observability and compliance - Lower total cost of ownership due to reduced duplication
• Greater employee satisfaction due to clearer roles and fewer internal battles And most importantly, business leaders stop asking “Why is IT so slow?” because the model itself enables agility - not hinders it.

 The Contract Agreement Behind the Org Chart

The platform-product operating model isn’t just a structure or a set of roles. It’s a mutual agreement - an unwritten but essential contract - between two groups that rely on each other to deliver.

• Platform teams commit to enablement: reusable capabilities, secure environments, and self-service tools that let others move faster.
• Product teams commit to value: delivering outcomes using shared capabilities and shaping demand in a way that helps platforms scale.

This agreement isn’t signed in a boardroom, but it is lived in the day-to-day:

• How teams escalate
• How requests are prioritized
• And how success is measured together

When this agreement is clear and respected, delivery accelerates and friction fades.

So ask yourself:

Do your platform and product teams have this agreement in place? Or is the operating model just a re-org with undefined rules?