Mailbag: How to deal with unhappy users on your Internal platform?

Great topic and interesting to hear Larson's take on this. His solution?

Often when folks are frustrated with lack of power, it turns out to be an interface design issue, and I started to focus on the idea of providing pierceable abstractions to allow users to bypass the abstractions as necessary to reach another layer of complexity (e.g. from container to VM). It's not that you want them to bypass the abstraction, just that it's hard to prioritize every teams' specific needs, and letting them bypass allows you to address their problem on your schedule rather than their schedule.

Interesting. Provide a way out of the value that you are providing so that your end-user, who is super technical, can solve their own problems when their priorities do not match with the platform teams priorities. Makes sense.