Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly drizzle of platform engineering syrup. Every week, we dig into the conversations, research and ideas moving our community forward.
Plus…
Our new free course is live! Developer Portals for Platform Engineers is one hour on what breaks first when AI is doing a real share of the work, and how to keep ownership, reliability, and security from falling apart when it does.
Annnnnnd we had PlatformCon Paris this week. What a day! It was great to give the keynote with Manuel Pais, a big thank you to all the Parisian platform engineering community for coming to the book signing. Platform Engineering is entering its agentic era, and Paris you’re definitely onboard.
Should you force teams to use your platform?
It’s a golden era for research into the platform engineering space. In this week’s Platform Engineering community webinar, Sam Barlien (who co-authored our State of AI in Platform Engineering report with me) interviewed Dr. Charlotte Fleming from Octopus Deploy on their new report, “The Future of Platform Engineering.”
And the insights are pretty interesting…
Getting adoption on your platform has always been a tricky subject. It’s not enough to simply build it and hope they come, while mandates have tended to be a sign of an immature platform. The thing is - mandates are a tool in the tool box. And we see that becoming even more clear, particularly when it comes to enabling AI.
62.2% of teams with mandated platforms report their platforms better achieve their goals, compared to just 27.5% of teams with platforms without mandates.
78.9% of mandatory platforms are confident their budget will be renewed over the next five years.
Yet platforms without mandates are now the majority at 54.1%, up from 37% last year.
So is mandating a silver bullet for becoming a successful platform? If only things were so easy;)
In Thinking in Platforms, Kaspar and I talk about carrots and sticks. Carrots are the reasons teams choose your platform. Sticks are orders from above, and they can badly backfire. Our advice is to disguise your sticks as carrots. Rather than punishing teams who aren’t on the platform, reward the ones who are.
Make policies mandatory, and let the platform earn its place.
And that matters even more with AI. In the State of AI in Platform Engineering Volume 2, the teams pulling ahead are the ones whose guardrails, identity and cost controls live in the platform. That makes your platform the easiest way to use AI safely. Which is about the juiciest carrot you’ll ever get.
So does this finding give you carte blanche to mandate your crappy platform? NO. But if your platform drives clear wins and adoption still isn’t moving fast enough, a mandate can be the catalyst.
But are mandates the only takeaway from the report? No shot.
Platforms that have been running for 3+ years are 2.4x more likely to be a platform that achieves (Not a surprise with the journey of MVP to IDP to AEP.)
The most common number of features a platform team owns jumped from 4 to 23 in a single year (Don’t you just love when the data corroborates your slogan? #PlatformEngineeringEatsTheWorld)
Slack and Teams channels are both the #1 most used and #1 least effective way to get platform feedback (42.2% of teams still rely on them as their main source of feedback…)
Go watch the full conversation with Sam and Charlotte, and download the report, then send them to your team, your boss, and your whole family.
As always… stay crunchy 🥐
Quick bites
Highlight of the week
Every trend in the State of Platform Engineering report started as an answer to this survey. The next volume is taking shape now, and we need you in it. From AI agents blowing everything up to adoption disasters, tell us here what’s really happening on your platform team. It’s quick, and it’s the most direct way to shape where platform engineering goes next!
From the community
Every PlatformCon talk, past and present, is on the Platform Engineering YouTube channel.
The distinction between mandatory policy and mandatory platform is doing a lot of work here. The numbers are interesting, but a mandate may also be a proxy for executive sponsorship, funding and organizational maturity. I’d want to compare time-to-first-value, exception rate, bypasses and support load, not only reported goal attainment. A platform can achieve high formal adoption while teams quietly build shadow paths around it. Make safety, identity and cost controls mandatory; make the paved road earn continued use.