Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Platform as a product has been around for almost 10 years now. What has changed, what has stayed exactly the same, and what platform teams still get wrong is what Caleb Washburn and @thecote get into here.
Check out the refreshed white paper: vmware.com/docs/platform-as-a-product-wp
Caleb is CTO and co-founder at MomentumAI, a platform engineering consultancy. Before that he was at Pivotal, and before that he was inside State Farm building this stuff for real. Coté helped refresh the platform as a product white paper this year, the one first published back in 2017.
The core thing they keep coming back to is: what happens when a platform team asks developers what they want? They say “give us Kubernetes clusters”, the infrastructure team ships Kubernetes clusters, and everyone files it under success. As Caleb puts it: “It’s not that that’s what they wanted, it’s what they knew you would give them.” Both sides walk away satisfied and nobody built a platform.
They cover:
- The golden blueprint that gets forked five hundred ways, and what happens when the first CVE lands
- Why a build pipeline and a platform are always in a quiet cold war
- What Cloud Foundry gave teams that Kubernetes leaves as homework
- Whatever happened to the internal developer portal (IDP), and why the portal was really the human API
- What a platform team looks like five years in, once the people who built it have moved on
The Paper
“Why You Should Treat Your Platform as a Product,” June 2026 revision, free, no gate:
vmware.com/docs/platform-as-a-product-wp
Find Caleb and Momentum
Caleb Washburn: linkedin.com/in/calebwashburn
Caleb on X: https://x.com/calebawashburn
Caleb on GitHub: github.com/calebwashburn
MomentumAI: wearemomentum.ai
MomentumAI on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/we-are-momentumai
Learn more about Tanzu Platform: tanzu.vmware.com
Index
0:00 Do platform teams actually have product managers?
1:35 Can you get by without one?
2:39 Caleb Washburn, MomentumAI
4:15 State Farm, and what’s fun about boring applications
5:48 Move the abstraction so nobody has to wrangle YAML
7:24 Why talking to your users isn’t already the normal state
9:28 The golden blueprint, forked five hundred ways
10:30 Then the CVE lands
12:02 Your build pipeline and your platform are in a cold war
13:35 The security scanner wired into a thousand pipelines
14:39 What Cloud Foundry forced that Kubernetes leaves as homework
15:39 There is no CNCF spec for an app CRD
16:12 Nginx pulls the open source ingress controller
17:14 Do infrastructure people believe in layers of abstraction?
20:20 “What’s your platform?” “Kubernetes.”
21:22 Asking for what you know you’ll get
22:25 Deferring the Day 2 conversation
23:58 Shadow IT, now with AI
24:29 Whatever happened to the internal developer portal
26:04 The portal was the human API
27:37 Five years of making Kubernetes useful
28:38 Give me a URL that terminates TLS
29:40 How a platform team earns the right to be asked for more
31:45 “We’ve never talked to those humans ever”
34:24 The restaurant where nobody orders off the menu
36:29 What a platform team looks like five years in
39:07 What happens when you move the people who built it
39:38 Treat it like an API, not a project
41:42 Give the old thing and the new thing to the same team
43:15 What MomentumAI does when it shows up
45:51 Platform therapy
46:53 Most of it isn’t a technology problem
47:46 Where to find Caleb
Platform as a product has been around for almost 10 years now. What has changed, what has stayed exactly the same, and what platform teams still get wrong is what Caleb Washburn and @thecote get into here.
Check out the refreshed white paper: vmware.com/docs/platform-as-a-product-wp
Caleb is CTO and co-founder at MomentumAI, a platform engineering consultancy. Before that he was at Pivotal, and before that he was inside State Farm building this stuff for real. Coté helped refresh the platform as a product white paper this year, the one first published back in 2017.
The core thing they keep coming back to is: what happens when a platform team asks developers what they want? They say “give us Kubernetes clusters”, the infrastructure team ships Kubernetes clusters, and everyone files it under success. As Caleb puts it: “It’s not that that’s what they wanted, it’s what they knew you would give them.” Both sides walk away satisfied and nobody built a platform.
They cover:
- The golden blueprint that gets forked five hundred ways, and what happens when the first CVE lands
- Why a build pipeline and a platform are always in a quiet cold war
- What Cloud Foundry gave teams that Kubernetes leaves as homework
- Whatever happened to the internal developer portal (IDP), and why the portal was really the human API
- What a platform team looks like five years in, once the people who built it have moved on
The Paper
“Why You Should Treat Your Platform as a Product,” June 2026 revision, free, no gate:
vmware.com/docs/platform-as-a-product-wp
Find Caleb and Momentum
Caleb Washburn: linkedin.com/in/calebwashburn
Caleb on X: https://x.com/calebawashburn
Caleb on GitHub: github.com/calebwashburn
MomentumAI: wearemomentum.ai
MomentumAI on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/we-are-momentumai
Learn more about Tanzu Platform: tanzu.vmware.com
Index
0:00 Do platform teams actually have product managers?
1:35 Can you get by without one?
2:39 Caleb Washburn, MomentumAI
4:15 State Farm, and what’s fun about boring applications
5:48 Move the abstraction so nobody has to wrangle YAML
7:24 Why talking to your users isn’t already the normal state
9:28 The golden blueprint, forked five hundred ways
10:30 Then the CVE lands
12:02 Your build pipeline and your platform are in a cold war
13:35 The security scanner wired into a thousand pipelines
14:39 What Cloud Foundry forced that Kubernetes leaves as homework
15:39 There is no CNCF spec for an app CRD
16:12 Nginx pulls the open source ingress controller
17:14 Do infrastructure people believe in layers of abstraction?
20:20 “What’s your platform?” “Kubernetes.”
21:22 Asking for what you know you’ll get
22:25 Deferring the Day 2 conversation
23:58 Shadow IT, now with AI
24:29 Whatever happened to the internal developer portal
26:04 The portal was the human API
27:37 Five years of making Kubernetes useful
28:38 Give me a URL that terminates TLS
29:40 How a platform team earns the right to be asked for more
31:45 “We’ve never talked to those humans ever”
34:24 The restaurant where nobody orders off the menu
36:29 What a platform team looks like five years in
39:07 What happens when you move the people who built it
39:38 Treat it like an API, not a project
41:42 Give the old thing and the new thing to the same team
43:15 What MomentumAI does when it shows up
45:51 Platform therapy
46:53 Most of it isn’t a technology problem
47:46 Where to find Caleb
