Infrastructure as a product
21 Jan 2026
Museum of Fantastic Illusions, Prague, January 2026 @babafemio
Several years ago, a conversation with a Microsoft executive fundamentally changed how I viewed technology. I asked him what had transformed Microsoft’s technology organisation. He admitted it was difficult to pinpoint any single factor, as Technology transformations rarely hinge on just one thing. But he did share one thing he wished he had done much sooner: hiring software engineers and product managers.
When most people hear “product management,” they think of consumer, banking, and retail apps. The truth is, all these amazing products in any technology organisation rely on critical infrastructure that nobody sees, and that only a few people who manage them care about. Think of our servers, network switches, load balancers, storage systems, data and observability tooling, and other internal tools and enterprise planning systems that keep thousands of employees productive. These systems need to be managed like products, too! But it is hard to imagine. At Interswitch Limited, we treat our infrastructure as products, and have done so for over three years. Even now, we still sometimes cock our heads at the weirdness of it all. But it really works!
For too long, the industry has treated infrastructure services as “technical back-office work,” or those IT initiatives that the rest of the organisation seldom understands and tend to cost a lot of money. But infrastructure has a lifecycle. It has stakeholders, which are strangely everyone, and stakeholders have requirements! It has user journeys. It has performance expectations. It has a commercial impact. And it directly shapes the customer experience, even if customers never touch it or even know it exists!
When you manage infrastructure as a product, everything changes:
- You stop reacting and start prioritising intentionally.
- You move from ticket fulfilment to long-term capability building.
- You build roadmaps that align with business outcomes, not only technical/geek goals.
- You measure adoption, reliability, and ROI, not just uptime.
- You communicate value in a language the business understands.
Most importantly, you create clarity for both engineers building the systems and executives making strategic decisions and approving the budgets.
Technology services are not merely “support functions.” They are enablers of scale, resilience, and innovation. When managed with the same rigour as customer-facing products, organisations don’t just grow, they mature.
The future of technology leadership in Africa depends on how well we productize our platforms, capabilities, and internal services. We must take decisive action to strengthen product management and infrastructure, ensuring we deliver outstanding customer experiences.