Platform engineering is the hot topic in infrastructure. Everyone's talking about internal developer platforms, golden paths, and self-service infrastructure. Conferences are full of talks about platform teams. The question is whether your company actually needs one.
The answer depends on your scale, your pain points, and your ability to staff a team that delivers value without becoming an ivory tower. Platform teams done well are force multipliers. Platform teams done poorly are expensive overhead that slows everyone down.
What Platform Teams Actually Do
Platform teams build and maintain shared capabilities that make product engineering teams more productive. The specifics vary, but common responsibilities include:
Developer experience. CI/CD pipelines, development environments, deployment tooling. The stuff engineers interact with every day. When it works well, developers deploy confidently and iterate quickly. When it doesn't, every team fights the same battles independently.
Shared infrastructure. Databases, message queues, observability, service mesh. Capabilities that multiple teams need but shouldn't each build from scratch. The platform team provides standardized, supported versions that product teams can consume.
Golden paths. Opinionated templates and patterns that make the right way the easy way. Want to create a new service? The platform provides a template with best practices built in. This reduces cognitive load and ensures consistency.
Self-service capabilities. Allowing product teams to provision resources, manage configurations, and handle routine operations without filing tickets or waiting for ops teams. Autonomy for product teams, reduced toil for platform engineers.
When You're Ready for a Platform Team
Platform teams make sense at a certain scale. Too early and you're creating overhead that doesn't pay off. Signs you might be ready:
Multiple teams solving the same problems. If three different teams have each built their own deployment pipeline, you have waste that a platform team could eliminate. Look for patterns of reinvention across teams.
Infrastructure knowledge is a bottleneck. When product engineers are blocked waiting for "the person who knows Kubernetes" or "the one who can set up the database," you have expertise bottlenecks. A platform team codifies this expertise into tools anyone can use.
Consistency is a problem. Different teams using different patterns makes it hard to maintain, debug, and move between teams. When inconsistency is creating real costs, platform standardization helps.
You have 30+ engineers. Below a certain size, the overhead of a separate platform team isn't justified. The threshold varies, but if you're under 30 engineers, you probably don't need a dedicated platform team yet.
When You're Not Ready
Platform teams can also be premature investments:
You're still finding product-market fit. Early-stage startups need speed above all else. Building elegant internal platforms is a distraction from the main goal. Duct tape and scripts are fine when you're still figuring out what to build.
You don't have strong platform engineers available. Platform work requires experienced engineers who understand both the technical challenges and the user experience. If you can't staff the team well, it won't deliver value.
You don't have executive buy-in. Platform teams don't ship product features. Their value is enabling others to ship faster. Leaders who only value direct feature work will undercut platform teams, making them ineffective.
How to Start
If you've decided a platform team makes sense, how do you begin?
Start with the biggest pain point. Interview product engineers. What do they spend time on that isn't their core job? What's frustrating? What's broken? Build the thing that would make the biggest difference for the most teams.
Start small. One or two engineers focused on high-impact problems. Prove value before scaling. A tiny platform team that delivers meaningful improvements is better than a large team that builds things nobody uses.
Treat product teams as customers. Platform teams that build what they think is elegant rather than what product teams need become ivory towers. Talk to your users constantly. Measure adoption. If teams aren't using what you build, something is wrong.
Build golden paths, not gates. Platform capabilities should make the right thing easy, not make other things impossible. If using the platform is optional but easier, teams will adopt it. If it's mandatory but worse, they'll resent it.
Measuring Success
How do you know if your platform team is working?
Developer satisfaction. Survey product engineers regularly. Are they happier with the tools? Is the platform helping them move faster? If platform investment isn't improving developer experience, something's wrong. These surveys complement DORA metrics for a complete picture.
Time to productivity. How long does it take a new engineer to deploy code? How long to create a new service? These metrics should improve over time as the platform removes friction.
Platform adoption. What percentage of teams use the platform capabilities? Growing adoption suggests the platform is providing value. Stagnant adoption suggests it isn't meeting needs.
Incident rates. Does standardization reduce operational issues? Fewer deployment failures, faster recovery, more consistent behavior. These are platform outcomes even when they're measured in product metrics.
Support load. Is the platform enabling self-service or creating new bottlenecks? If product teams are constantly filing tickets with the platform team, the platform isn't self-service enough.
Common Failure Modes
Platform teams fail in predictable ways:
Building what's interesting, not what's needed. Platform engineers are often infrastructure enthusiasts who want to build elegant systems. Without strong product orientation, they build things nobody asked for while ignoring actual pain points.
Mandating without delivering value. Forcing teams onto a platform that doesn't work well for them creates resentment and slows delivery. Earn adoption through quality, don't mandate it through policy.
Becoming a bottleneck. Platform teams that centralize decisions and require approvals for everything slow things down. The goal is enabling autonomy, not creating new gatekeepers.
Ignoring operational burden. Building new platform capabilities without considering who maintains them. A platform that requires constant care and feeding from a small team doesn't scale.
Platform teams, done well, are one of the best investments a scaling engineering organization can make. They multiply the effectiveness of every product team. But they require the right timing, the right people, and relentless focus on serving their customers: the engineers who use what they build.
Frequently Asked Questions
Wondering if it's time to invest in a platform team?
Let's Talk →