As a Product Manager, I often questioned why more developers weren’t using my Platform. I thought I was building for everyone, but I was lucky if I had 1 or 2 enthusiastic users. The theory states that Platform Engineering allows DevOps to scale across an organisation, but in my implementations, it didn’t. As we shifted from the DevOps mindset to Platforms, the landscape of Platform Engineering evolved from being embedded within or adjacent to individual application teams to forming a central Platform team that serves multiple teams simultaneously. However, this transition created a widening gap between the Platform and its users—an empathy gap. The longer this separation persists, the bigger the empathy gap becomes. I believe we can close this gap by using Product Management techniques and treating our Platform as a Product. In this talk, Cat, a Product Manager with five years of experience working alongside Platform teams, will share practical Product Management techniques you can use when building your Platforms to close the Empathy Gap.