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Platform Engineering is a powerful way to improve developer productivity, experience, and time to market. Yet, despite its potential, many companies struggle to make their platform initiatives successful. Why? Common pitfalls like neglecting a product mindset or overengineering often derail even the best-intentioned efforts. Without the right approach, these platforms can become underused, overly complex and fail to deliver real value.
In this blog, we’ll explore the primary reasons why Platform Engineering initiatives fail and, more importantly, how you can avoid these pitfalls to ensure your platform becomes a key driver of innovation and success within your organisation.
Pitfall #1: Lack of a Product Mindset
One of the most common pitfalls in Platform Engineering is the lack of a product mindset. Platform teams often treat their work as a purely technical project, forgetting that they’re building a product for users or developers. These developers are not just colleagues they are the platform team’s customers. To succeed, platform teams must adopt a customer-centric approach, understanding and addressing the customers' needs and preferences as they would for any external client. Failing to do so will lead to missed opportunities for delivering real value and may result in low adoption rates.
For example, consider a company where the platform engineering team spent months building a CI/CD pipeline tool with cutting-edge features. However, they never or rarely consulted the development teams about their needs or pain points. When the tool was finally released, developers found integrating with their workflows overly complex and challenging. As a result, many teams reverted to using their own solutions, and the platform saw low adoption. Had the platform team engaged with their users and treated them as customers, they could have built a solution that addressed real developer challenges, ultimately leading to higher adoption and more value for the company.
A product mindset involves understanding the needs of the users who interact with the platform. Like external products, internal platforms should be designed with the end-user in mind, prioritising their pain points and workflows. When platform teams fail to adopt this mindset, they risk building tools that do not resonate with their users, leading to low adoption rates.
Never make your platform mandatory
One of the worst things you can do is make your platform mandatory. This approach often leads to resentment and low engagement from users, who may view the platform as a barrier rather than a helpful tool. Look at other successful products, like Apple, Hashicorp, and even Microsoft. They do not force you to buy their product; maybe Microsoft does, but that is beside the point. You buy their product because you decide that it is worth it. So, instead of making it mandatory, focus on building a platform users want to adopt because it solves their problems and improves their workflows. When users choose to use the platform voluntarily, it’s a sign that you’ve built something valuable.
Cultivating a Product Mindset
So now you might ask yourself, how can a platform team cultivate a product mindset? So start making sure that your teams implement the following practices:
- Engage with Users: Regularly interact with the end-users to gather insights about their needs, preferences, and pain points. Conduct surveys, interviews, and focus groups to ensure the platform evolves based on honest feedback.
- Prioritise Features Based on User Value: Instead of adding features based on what the platform team thinks is important, prioritise development based on users' needs.
- Measure Success: Define success metrics focusing on user engagement and satisfaction rather than technical performance. This shift in focus helps teams understand how well the platform serves its users.
Pitfall #2: Overcomplicating the Platform
Another reason Platform Engineering initiatives fail is the temptation to overengineer or what we at Xebia call “boiling the ocean.” This happens when platform teams try to solve every problem, address every edge case, and build a platform that can support anything and everything. While this ambition might seem admirable, it quickly increases complexity and maintenance costs.
“A jack of all trades, a master of none”
Consider a company where the platform engineering team set out to build a platform that could cater to every possible developer need. They invested in creating a highly flexible and customisable infrastructure supporting multiple languages, deployment strategies, and toolchains. However, as the platform grew, so did its complexity. The team spent enormous resources managing edge cases that only a few users needed. Developers became frustrated with the platform’s complexity, finding it difficult to navigate and configure for simple, everyday use cases. Adoption rates dropped as developers opted for more straightforward external solutions or even built their own tools.
The key to avoiding this pitfall is to build for 90% of the use cases and accept that the remaining 10% may not be worth the effort. Why? Because that last 10% introduces an exponential increase in complexity. Trying to cater to every possible scenario adds layers of technical overhead, makes the platform harder to maintain, and often complicates user experience. Of course, this can differ for each organisation, but the 90% rule is an excellent place to start.
Prioritising the most impactful 90% ensures the platform remains effective and aligned with its primary purpose. Ultimately, you cannot support everything, and trying to do so will only hinder the platform’s success. By building for the 90% and keeping complexity down, you set the stage for a platform that delivers real value to your users without becoming an unmanageable burden.
Pitfall #3: Underestimating the Power of Culture
A common misconception in Platform Engineering is that success relies only on technical excellence. You can build the most advanced, feature-rich platform, but without a cultural shift, it’s likely to fail. Platforms introduce new ways of working, which can disrupt current habits and workflows. Developers, therefore, may resist change. This is why the success of your platform depends not just on its technical capabilities but also on creating a culture that embraces it.
So, how can you kickstart this culture? Start with clear communication! When teams understand how the platform will benefit them—whether by reducing manual work, speeding up development, or improving collaboration—they are more likely to support the change.
Another thing that works well is celebrating early wins. Showcasing success stories where the platform has made an impact can spark confidence and encourage wider adoption. Highlight the teams that have embraced the platform and demonstrated measurable workflow improvements. Recognising and rewarding teams integrating with the platform helps create a positive feedback loop and reinforces the cultural shift toward platform adoption.
Conclusion
The success of Platform Engineering initiatives relies on more than technical excellence. We should balance user needs, simplicity, and culture. By avoiding common pitfalls like lacking a product mindset or overengineering, platform teams can build solutions that deliver real value without unnecessary complexity.
Adopting a customer-centric approach ensures that platforms are designed with developers in mind, fostering higher adoption rates and more significant impact. At the same time, avoiding the temptation to “boil the ocean” allows teams to focus on the most critical use cases, reducing complexity and maintenance overhead.
However, it’s not just about the platform itself; cultural adoption is equally essential. Clear communication, early wins, and positive reinforcement are key to ensuring the platform becomes a part of the organisation’s DNA.
By addressing both the technical and cultural dimensions of Platform Engineering, organisations can unlock the full potential of their platforms, driving productivity, innovation, and long-term success. Do you want to know more about how to adopt Platform Engineering? Check out this whitepaper: Whitepaper on successful internal platform adoption
This atricle is part of Xebia's knowledge base in Platform Engineering