#110: why 18% are failing

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your kick of platform engineering sand. Every week we unpack the latest and greatest in platform engineering news, trends, best practices, and lessons.

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• I tried to summarise 30 pages of data into 1 webinar on the State of Platform Engineering
• Everything you need to know about the platform engineering certification
• The PlatformCon CFP is filling up at the fastest rate ever!

why 18% of platforms are failing

There is a reason why one of the most common stories in the platform engineering fundamentals course is, “We built a platform. No one is using it. Now what?” You might have the best platform ever - but if no one uses it who cares? Or worse, if those who use it are only active users because it’s been enforced..

Adoption is the life or death question for any product, and platform engineering is no different. It’s no surprise that when looking at data from the most recent State of Platform Engineering most platforms, if they are adopted, are adopted by force. If you spent a year and 4m building one and no one uses it? Well, guess you have to force your customers to use it.

What you don’t realize is that your only adoption is by force - your platform is likely dead already.

So what can you do if you want to avoid this deathtrap and ensure your platform actually gets adopted? This is an immense topic ofc, we cover it across multiple hours in the course. But here are 3 crucial things to think about.

• Bottom Up Top Down: As my friend Kaspar von Grünberg eloquently put it in his newsletter last week. By focusing on the developer from the beginning, you are building allies from the ground up, and most of all you’re understanding what the actual users need. 1 developer who LOVEs your platform has 100x more power to drive adoption than anyone else.
• Start small: I guarantee that if you start small with a single team, you’ll have more users on your platform in 1 year, than if you tried to build a platform for 100 teams on day 1. 
• ACTUALLY TREAT YOUR PLATFORM LIKE A PRODUCT: How banal and obvious you might shout at me here. Platform as a Product is such a key part of platform engineering for a reason. Good products involve user research, they involve feedback and iteration. They are about understanding your customers’ needs, wants and balancing the two. I can guarantee you that half the platforms surveyed in the state of platform engineering are missing the key details of Platform as a Product (whether it’s they’re fault or not).

It’s not a coincidence that the platform engineering course focuses so heavily on helping teams understand how to actually put platform as a product into practice, how to start small, and grow, and how to sell your platform.

Because in the end, that is what is going to drive adoption of it. And in the end. Adoption is everything.