The Golden Rule of Platforms

Eat your own dogfood

This article was originally published on my blog — https://kislayverma.com/platform-thinking/the-golden-rule-of-platforms/

The Golden rule of platforms (™ Steve Yegge) is simple and well known — Eat your own dogfood.

In the context of building technical platforms, it means that the first user of your platform is you. While this seems a fairly simple thing, certainly too simple to be THE golden rule, this guideline has very deep repercussions around why a platform is built, how it is built, and the impact it has on an organization.

The Golden Rule plays the essential counterfoil to the other cardinal rule of building platforms — a platform must be externally programmable. External programmability ensures that anyone can build cool new things on top of a platform without having to buy into your business opinions. “Eat your own dogfood” turns external programmability inwards by dictating that even internal teams, even the platform owner itself, must use the platform just as if it was provided by an external party. No backdoors. No special access. No admins. Nothing that you wouldn’t allow a complete stranger to do.

External programmability is the knife that separates platforms from products. The Golden Rule is this knife applied to the platform owner’s business.