Platform Teams: Avoid Becoming a Catch-All
Real problems, hard lessons, and how to stay focused
In my previous post on Developer Experience, I wrote about the value platform teams bring to engineering orgs—and why DevX is core to making that work.
Lately, platform teams have gained a lot of attention, often compared to DevOps or SRE teams. But having worked in platform teams across multiple orgs, I’ve seen that while the promise of a platform team is great, the reality often gets messy.
Here are a few challenges I’ve faced—and lessons learned along the way.
1. Platform Work Has a Long Feedback Loop
Platform projects are usually long-term. Add slow adoption (especially in large orgs), and it can take weeks or even months to know if a release made an impact.
This is very different from product teams, which get feedback quickly from users, metrics, or A/B tests. For platform work, success is often subtle and delayed—and harder to measure.
Over time, that delay can drain motivation.
What helped:
Celebrate small wins. Even a working POC, adoption by one team, or shaving minutes off CI time is a win.
Define platform-specific metrics.
Improving observability? Track MTTD (mean time to detect) or MTTR (mean time to repair).
Building CI/CD tooling? Track deploy frequency, failure rate, or downtime hours.
Demo internally. Show your work. Build trust.
2. Don’t Become the Bottleneck
In fast-moving orgs, platform teams often become a blocker—usually unintentionally.
Product teams depend on the platform for infra access, deploy automation, observability setup, or network configs. But when automation lags or processes are unclear, product teams either wait—or find hacks.
This puts platform teams in a tough spot:
Ship fast and fix it later? Or slow things down to “do it right”?
What helped:
Convention over configuration. Standardize defaults, configs, naming patterns—anywhere a dev has to make a decision, help them make the right one faster.
Invest in documentation-as-a-product. If someone’s stuck, docs should be the unblocker—not Slack.
Pre-empt needs. Stay one step ahead by tracking repeat asks and turning them into products.
3. Avoid Becoming the Dumping Ground
This one’s common: anything that doesn’t fit cleanly into a product team’s scope ends up on a platform ticket. From one-off S3 buckets to VPN questions to “hey can you help with this test suite,” the list grows quickly.
Most of these aren’t complex. The issue isn’t difficulty—it’s unclear ownership.
Platform teams then spend increasing time on support work, often needing separate sprints or even dedicated sub-teams to handle tickets.
What helped:
Clarify ownership boundaries. If a task doesn’t need deep platform knowledge, it shouldn’t come to the platform team.
Create playbooks and self-serve tools. Most support tickets can be avoided with good internal guides and small CLI tools.
Enable, don’t gate. Help product teams help themselves.
Final Thoughts
Platform teams can be incredibly impactful—but only when they stay focused.
The goal isn’t to be everything to everyone. It’s to build leverage, not load.
That means saying no, simplifying where it matters, and making space to celebrate the progress you’re making behind the scenes.
🚀 Let’s Chat
What’s your experience been like working with or inside a platform team?
Have you run into any of these challenges—or solved them differently?
Drop a comment or reach out—I’d love to learn from your story.
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