A product operating model can include three distinct kinds of technology teams: product teams that build and evolve business-aligned products, platform teams that provide reusable capabilities to other teams, and services teams that keep essential technology operations reliable. This framework comes from Michael Bertha’s March 10, 2025 opinion article for CIO; it is a useful way to clarify responsibilities, not a universal or empirically validated standard.
What are the three team types?
Bertha’s framework distinguishes teams by whom they serve, what they contribute, and how they balance operational work with change. A team’s label alone is not enough to classify it: its product, users, and responsibilities matter.
| Team type | Who depends on it | Primary contribution | Work emphasis in Bertha’s framework |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product team | External customers, employees, or partners who use a business-aligned product | Builds and evolves a customer-facing or business-aligned product in collaboration with business units | Relatively more grow and transform work, while maintaining core functionality |
| Platform team | Often internal product teams | Provides shared capabilities, such as APIs, data platforms, authentication, and integration layers | Balances run, grow, and transform work while maintaining and expanding reusable services |
| Services team | Internal business users and the wider technology organization | Keeps critical technology operations and enterprise capabilities reliable | Prioritizes run work, with measured improvement over time |
These work emphases describe the framework, not measured percentages or a prescribed allocation of team capacity.
What does each team do in practice?
Product teams: improve something users rely on
A product team is accountable for a business-aligned product and its evolution. Its users may be customers outside the organization or people inside it, such as employees or partners. The team works with business units, maintains core functionality, and generally places more emphasis on growing and transforming the product than a services team would.
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Platform teams: make shared capabilities reusable
A platform team serves other teams by providing capabilities they can build on, rather than by owning a direct customer-facing product in every case. Shared APIs, data platforms, authentication, and integration layers are examples in Bertha’s article. Because other product teams depend on these capabilities, platform work combines keeping them running with improving and expanding them.
Services teams: keep essential technology dependable
Services teams support internal business users and the broader technology organization. Their remit can include critical operations and enterprise applications. Bertha’s examples address a common classification question: teams maintaining systems such as SAP or Salesforce, or supporting IT operations, still have a place in a product-oriented model. Their primary emphasis is reliable day-to-day operation, alongside measured improvement.
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How do run, grow, and transform work differ?
The framework uses three broad kinds of work to explain the teams’ differing emphasis:
- Run: maintain the reliability and operation of existing technology and services.
- Grow: improve or extend what an existing product or service can do.
- Transform: make more substantial changes to capabilities or the business they support.
All three types of teams need to meet day-to-day needs while improving over time. The difference is emphasis: product teams tend toward grow and transform work while preserving core functionality; platform teams balance all three; services teams prioritize run work and improve in a measured way. These are qualitative distinctions, not a benchmark or a rule that every team must follow.
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How should leaders apply the framework?
Use the categories to make ownership and collaboration clearer, not to force every group into a label. Bertha recommends that leaders:
- Clarify roles and responsibilities. Identify who owns a product, who provides capabilities shared by multiple teams, and who is accountable for reliable operations. Make dependencies visible where ownership crosses team boundaries.
- Choose success measures that fit each contribution. Adoption, uptime, and customer experience are examples Bertha names; the relevant emphasis can differ by team type. A single measure applied identically to every team may not reflect the value it is meant to deliver.
- Encourage cross-team collaboration. Product teams rely on platforms, and both may rely on reliable enterprise services. Coordinate roadmaps and operational needs so that improvements in one area do not undermine another.
- Keep roadmaps and improvement continuous. Bertha describes product-oriented teams as using proactive, long-term roadmaps, iterative working practices, and stakeholder alignment while balancing business evolution with day-to-day operations.
Are these categories universal?
No. They are categories proposed in Bertha’s CIO opinion article, not a formally validated standard or a claim that every organization uses the same names, boundaries, or team composition. The article notes that composition and customer relationships vary with the kind of product a team supports. An organization may therefore use different labels or divide responsibilities differently.
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The practical test is the team’s main contribution and its users: does it own a business-aligned product, provide reusable capabilities to other teams, or keep essential technology services dependable? Some teams may have responsibilities that span more than one category, making explicit ownership and coordination especially important.
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