My 2c's are that platform teams are a silo for expertise on how anything is run at a company and can become a bottleneck for other teams when getting things done. In an ideal scenario the product team can consume resources via an API, but in my experience resources are only assigned via a ticketing system and the associated communication barriers this creates leads to friction.
jitix|2 years ago
Yes it creates friction and reduces velocity at ticket level but it prevents misalignment errors in UAT and production. This can be solved somewhat by having dedicated product owners in each module but it's often not feasible for smaller companies and brings in too much non-technical chatter.
For example, if your product acts as a metadata repository as well as a task execution engine it is important that the execution engine modules access the metadata only using streamlined (and maintained) internal APIs and not hit the database or maintain duplicate metadata for different engines. This way you actually improve velocity at milestone/release level because you're free to make changes to the metadata codebase without breaking features in various downstream execution engines.
In my experience, with a well-scoped platform team, the integration phase of a release gets significantly smoother with fewer defects. YMMV based on product type and company size.