Customers - Eng Ops

Engineering Operations (Platform Engineering) traditionally think we are the "X" technology team.  While this is partially true, the mindset risks alienating your customers and create complications in prioritization and communication.

They are entirely internal to a business: 

 - product engineering teams
 - risk management
 - finance
 - leadership
 - support
 - all employees.

This team's biggest customers are product engineering teams, risk management, and finance.  Product engineering being the most obvious, where DevOps creates the foundational infrastructure that automates deployments, scales to load, and provides testing environments. At the same time, risk management teams appreciate infrastructure not only following best practices, but also following company compliance and risk guidelines.  Finally, this team has the keys to typically the most expensive vendor spend (for SaaS companies), so they always have finances' attention.

This team's biggest customers are product engineering teams, support, and risk management. SRE provides the infrastructure, tools, and patterns/practices to minimize the time product engineering and support teams spend troubleshooting production issues (including troubleshooting false alarms).  Similarly, keeping outage windows small places the company at less financial/reputational risk, appeasing risk management.

The biggest customers are every employee, risk management and finance.  Much like DevOps, but highly specialized, IT is focused on ensuring every employee can do their job as quickly as possible, while exposing the company to as small risk and cost as feasible.  This broad scope requires a stupid breadth of tools and practices, often third-party vendors, which makes them best friends with finance.

For SaaS companies, data is gold.  As such, the customers are every employee, leadership, and risk management.  Every employee needs data to do their job effectively and the Data team is responsible for having accessible, accurate and understandable data. Leadership especially needs this data to monitor key areas of the business.  Lastly, risk management is highly attuned to data security and compliance.