Platform Teams and the Developer Experience Gap
Why Internal Platforms Succeed or Fail Based on DevX
Before diving into developer experience (DevX), it’s important to understand the role of a platform team.
What Is a Platform Team?
Gergely Orosz described it well in his blog The Pragmatic Engineer: platform teams build the internal building blocks that product teams use to ship customer-facing features. A good platform helps teams move faster, more safely, and with less friction.
Platform teams can work at many layers—providing infrastructure, central tooling, service creation flows, CI/CD, config management, observability, experimentation, and more.
Developer Experience ≠ Just Developer Tools
When your users are developers, it’s easy to assume they’ll figure things out. So we ship command-line tools with verbose flags, dashboards that need digging, or runbooks buried in wikis—because “they’ll manage.”
But this mindset leads to:
Over-complicated setup processes
Layers of configuration
Weak documentation and poor onboarding
Confusion around what’s owned, automated, or expected
This is very different from how we treat non-developer end-users, where we aim for delight and simplicity.
Just because our users are developers doesn’t mean they deserve less.
Why DevX Matters More Than Ever
In 2025, developer velocity is a product moat. The easier it is for engineers to create, test, and ship code, the faster a company moves.
Good DevX:
Reduces cognitive load
Speeds up onboarding
Prevents avoidable mistakes
Encourages consistency without enforcing rigidity
For platform teams, DevX isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the core product.
A Simple Example
Let’s walk through a simplified, ideal developer experience.
Context: Nilesh from the Growth team needs to launch a rewards microservice.
What the flow looks like in a DevX-focused org:
Nilesh logs into the internal developer dashboard.
He clicks “Create new app”, selects a language (say, Node.js), and chooses dependencies like Postgres and Redis.
He’s given a GitHub repo with:
Boilerplate folder structure
Linting and testing setup
Docker Compose with service dependencies
CI/CD pipeline configured with build, test, and deploy stages
He writes code. CI/CD deploys it to staging, then prod, without needing help from infra or DevOps.
What Nilesh skipped:
Filing infra requests
Setting up GitHub permissions
Picking or aligning framework versions
Writing config files for lint, test, and deploy from scratch
Coordinating with DevOps for deploy pipelines
This isn’t about 100% automation—it’s about removing unnecessary steps so engineers can focus on solving business problems.
What DevX Really Means
Developer experience isn’t about flashy portals or adding more tools. It’s about thoughtful defaults, reducing friction, and enabling autonomy without chaos.
At its core, good DevX means:
Better documentation and discoverability
Simple integration and testing paths
Clear ownership models
Fast feedback loops
Decentralised decisions with guardrails
Closing Thoughts
A high-growth engineering org is like a well-oiled machine. The platform team is the layer that keeps the rest running smoothly. When DevX is neglected, platform efforts become bottlenecks. But when DevX is intentional, it becomes a multiplier.
If you’re building or evolving a platform team, start with developer experience.
It’s not a feature—it’s the foundation.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear how your team approaches DevX.
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