The term Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) was coined in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.

In essence, stream-aligned teams will typically deliver work rapidly using a platform. Platform teams manage these platforms for such stream-aligned teams.

To be effective, a platform should be as simple as possible. It should be offered on a self-serve basis, as a service.

A simple example of a platform may just be a simple wiki page detailing the cloud services used as the platform.

It is critical for platforms to be internal products. Their outcomes and KPIs should be measured (for example, Cycle Time and the developer satisfaction of using such platforms).

A common trap that organisations fall into is that they adopt technical practises that they don't have the internal capability to maintain, instead of adopting simpler and more widely adopted practices. For example; adopting monorepos at the cost of huge effort, when they don't have the capability to create the build tooling they need to scale them.