From Team Topologies (Manuel Pais, Matthew Skelton): a platform should be the minimum surface area that still accelerates software delivery for teams building on it. > "A TVP is a careful balance between keeping the platform small and ensuring that the platform is helping to accelerate and simplify software delivery for teams building on the platform." The TVP principle resists the temptation to build a comprehensive internal cloud — instead it asks: what is the smallest investment that unblocks teams? ## Cross-Domain Applications **Internal developer platforms**: Build the smallest golden-path scaffold (CI defaults, secrets management, observability hooks) and resist adding features until teams request them. **SaaS product design**: Minimum viable API surface — ship the narrowest contract that covers 80% of use cases; complexity compounds as surface grows. **Shared services / platform teams**: Treat internal users (developers) as customers. Measure cognitive load reduction, not feature count. A smaller platform with clear docs beats a comprehensive platform with poor discoverability. **Organizational design**: Platform teams that grow too large create the bottleneck they were meant to eliminate. TVP constrains scope, which constrains headcount. ## References - [[Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Cognitive Load]] (InfoQ, Oct 2022) - Team Topologies — Pais & Skelton