Platform Engineering

Part III. What Does Success Look Like?

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2

A platform team running as hard as it can can often appear to be making little progress. You get some systems into a steady state, enabling your team to focus on other areas, only to be pulled back a year or two later when the systems are outdated and no longer serve the company. Your paved paths that make the 80% happy still leave the other 20% grumbling that their needs haven’t been addressed. You hire the perfect balanced team, only to go through a budget crunch that forces you to lay off some, or a growth cycle that sees great people leave for greener pastures. On top of this, even when you are progressing, delivering value is slow; it takes time to build a high-quality product, time to convince customers to use it, and time to migrate everyone.

This is why we oppose textbook “metrics and measures” approaches as the primary way of talking about platform engineering success. That’s not to say they are useless; we will cover adoption and customer satisfaction metrics in this part of the book, and ...