This week I spent a wonderful day at a company that shall remain unnamed. I was asked to talk about platforms, about data, about connectivity, about cloud, about R&D effectiveness and all the topics that I really enjoy sharing. It turns out that the company has tried platform approaches in a variety of different ways without reaping the benefits. During the coffee break, I was questioned by several of the engineers who asked about a variety of platform related topics and I realized that many were mixing the what and the how. For example, many assumed that having a platform requires the organization to have a platform team. You know, one of those teams that slows everything down because the product teams have to wait for the platform team to get around to their functionality requests. That is of course a false assumption as there are many other approaches that one can use, including an inner-source way of working. This confounding of the what and the how is very common and applies to many different situations, in my experience. So, as my reflection today, are you sure you are not mixing the what and the how?