You Don't Need a Platform Team to Have a Platform (But You Do Need Golden Paths)
Overview Two posts in, and both have been about a trap. Build an internal platform you can’t staff, or rent a hosted one you eventually outgrow. The most common reply I got was the fair one: If the constraint is headcount, and I’m not getting headcount, what exactly am I supposed to do on Monday? That question contains the mistake, and I made it too for years. It treats “platform” and “platform team” as the same noun. They aren’t. DORA’s 2025 research found adoption close to universal — “90% of organizations reporting the use of an internal developer platform and 76% establishing dedicated platform teams”. The interesting part isn’t the gap between those two numbers. It’s that neither one predicts whether the platform is any good. ...