How Platform Teams Are Set Up To Fail

Hey folks,

Anyone else feel like platform engineers are set up to fail?

I've seen this happen a lot: organizations ask their platform teams to keep the lights on, scale the infrastructure, improve developer experience, migrate to the cloud, and... oh yeah, do it all with a skeleton crew and a shoestring budget.

It's not that these companies don't care. It's that leadership doesn't understand that platform engineering is a strategic investment, not a cost center.

They treat it like required plumbing and they avoid putting money towards it until things start breaking.

Here's what I've seen happen:

Phase 1, early neglect. The first couple platform engineers get pulled in ten directions. Technical debt piles up. Documentation? Nah, we don't do that here.

Phase 2, breakages occur. Something breaks in production. Or deployments slow to a crawl. Or security flags a dozen issues, meaning compliance is not going to happen this quarter. Or the critical guy who knew EVERYTHING leaves. Now, leadership cares.

Phase 3, band-aids on cuts that need stitches. The Masterpoint team, or another consulting shop, gets called in to stabilize things or to provide a new direction.

But the underlying problems remain:

• not enough people

• not enough time

• not enough organizational buy-in to do things right

What is sad is that platform engineering can be a force multiplier.

A well-supported platform team can greatly increase your entire engineering organization's:

• velocity

• reliability

• and long-term outlook

But you can't get these benefits by treating platform engineering as an afterthought.

What I described above isn't a technical challenge, which is why it's hard. This isn’t about installing the latest version of OpenTofu or implementing GitOps correctly. This is about convincing leadership that investing in the overall platform early is one core component of building a competitive advantage.

That solid foundations let you move faster, not slower.

May your leadership recognize the platform as an investment before fixing it becomes emergency spend,

Matt @ Masterpoint

PS If you want to chat platform stabilization or, even better, talk about how to avoid phase 1 and phase 2, grab some time on my calendar here. If you’ve found this newsletter helpful, please forward it to a friend. Or here’s the archive of all my newsletters for sharing wholesale.