Platform Engineering

Chapter 12. Your Platforms Are Trusted

Trust is like the air we breathe—when it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.

Warren Buffett

After the internal focus on building alignment within your team and its products, the next area of success is external: earning the trust of everyone else. You may ask, why should we put trust (a feeling or belief) ahead of results? Surely if you deliver platforms that manage complexity and so deliver leverage to the organization’s application teams, that is a more important signal than a second-order signal of trust?

When you get your platform team to a point where they are delivering value continuously, trust will follow. However, you have platforms in production today. Features and improvements for these platforms take time to deliver, and their delivery requires customer trust, in the form of patience and partnerships for testing, validating, and adoption. Without trust, a single unfortunate event can render your carefully crafted product roadmaps useless, forcing you to scramble with throwaway work to manage the crisis.

We have seen platforms lose trust in three main ways:

Operations

Not demonstrating operational ability at the scale customers need

Big investment buy-in

Not seeking buy-in on large investments before starting, under the assumption that no one outside the platform team should care

Being a bottleneck

Becoming a bottleneck to business initiatives, and so reducing rather than creating business ...