tl;dr: Platform engineering teams lack PMs and roadmaps, so staff engineers must "invent work" by reading signals from four sources: systems (crashes, cost, toil), users (interviews, overloaded use-cases, partner prototyping), the org (OKRs, manager repetition, migration laggards), and the industry (descriptive writing, lag arbitrage from industry trends). The author ranks these by how much argument they provide for free and whether they're leading or lagging indicators, favoring "overloaded use-cases" where users repurpose your platform in unintended ways—a leading signal with evidence already running in production. The real failure mode isn't an empty backlog but one built from the loudest signals rather than the most valuable.