When to adopt platform engineering: 5 key insights for strategic success

When to adopt platform engineering: 5 key insights for strategic success

Adopting platform engineering is a pivotal decision for any organization aiming to streamline its development processes and enhance productivity. This comprehensive approach promises economies of scale, improved developer experience, and significant operational efficiencies. 

However, understanding when to adopt platform engineering is crucial to extracting the maximum business value. Essential considerations, mindsets, and strategies indicate the right time to adopt platform engineering, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and readiness for change.

But let’s start with possible indicators, your organization might need to pivot to platform engineering.

1 - Indicators of when to adopt platform engineering

Identifying the right time to adopt platform engineering is crucial. Certain key indicators can signal when it's time to embrace this change. Yet, every organization is different.

While these indicators suggest considering platform engineering, we'll delve deeper into the topic to ensure you know exactly when your company is ready. For now, let's explore the basics of what platform engineering can solve.

Rapid growth and scaling challenges

Rapid growth forces an organization’s infrastructure to scale and accommodate increased demand. Traditional infrastructure management methods might struggle to keep up with the pace, leading to bottlenecks, performance issues, and higher operational costs. 

This might then be the time for you to provide a scalable framework that automates resource provisioning and management, enabling the organization's infrastructure to grow efficiently. 

Increasing complexity in infrastructure and deployments

Growth also affects applications. They often become more complex, incorporating numerous microservices, third-party APIs, and diverse environments. Managing this complexity with traditional methods might lead to complicated deployment processes, increased risk of errors, and longer deployment times. This means that each team within your organization has a do-it-yourself approach. 

You might then want to introduce standardized processes and automated workflows and ensure consistent deployments across different stages of development. A centralized solution that is used by people across your organization might then be the solution you are looking for.

Need for improved developer productivity

High developer productivity is essential for maintaining a competitive edge in the software industry. When developers are bogged down by manual configurations, repetitive tasks, and inefficient processes, their ability to innovate and deliver quality software diminishes. 

Think then about optimizing your developer experience to enhance productivity. Platform engineering provides self-service capabilities and automated tools that streamline the development process.

Demand for faster time-to-market

The ability to deliver new features and updates quickly is crucial for staying competitive. Traditional infrastructure management often involves lengthy provisioning and deployment cycles, which can delay product releases. 

Your organization may then need to accelerate these processes through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to respond quickly to market demands and more effectively capture market opportunities.

Necessity for enhanced security and compliance

Ensuring robust security and compliance is a top priority for organizations, especially those handling sensitive data or operating in regulated industries. Traditional methods of managing security and compliance can be time-consuming and prone to errors. 

Maybe platform engineering is your go-to solution, then. It integrates security best practices and compliance checks into the development pipeline, ensuring that security measures are consistently applied and auditable.

2 - The right time of adoption hinges on management and technical perspectives

The right time of platform adoption often necessitates a dual perspective approach: one from management and another from the technical team. Bridging these occasionally divergent viewpoints is crucial for consensus. 

Even if you fit into the category of one of the indicators mentioned above, only when management and technical teams are aligned will your organization be ready for adoption. So, how can you make sure of this alignment? We can structure the adoption timing in three steps.

1. Balance stakeholder expectations with platform readiness: Educate stakeholders about the platform's different maturity stages and how these correspond to the adoption process. Often, discrepancies arise when stakeholders focus solely on quantitative metrics, like user numbers, without considering qualitative impacts, such as enhancements in developer efficiency. 

1. Align with organizational strategy: Identify what priorities stakeholders are optimizing for, and remain well aware of budgetary limitations. Approach these considerations with care and be prepared to make strategic compromises to mitigate potential disruptions.

1. Engage stakeholders in the implementation: Ensure that stakeholders are integrally involved in the actual work. Experiencing the challenges firsthand fosters a better understanding and decision-making process. 

Comparison of two perspectives

Let’s examine the differing yet converging perspectives of management and technical teams. Once these two perspectives are unified, true platform engineering adoption can commence.

3 - How to ensure platform engineering adoption success

Platform engineering delivers substantial value, particularly in larger organizations with multiple teams and hundreds of engineers. However, even smaller organizations benefit if they share common patterns or infrastructure. 

The key is to build a critical mass of users to make the platform initiative sustainable. There are some considerations you might want to think about to build a critical mass of users.

• Solving developer problems at scale: Address only issues that affect a significant portion of your developers to ensure widespread utility.
• Strategic alignment and buy-in: Secure early buy-in from stakeholders and align the platform initiative with your organization's strategic goals.
• Internal marketing: Start promoting the platform early to build anticipation and acceptance among potential users.
• The right timing for change: Introduce the platform when your organization is ready for a shift, avoiding periods of major disruption.
• Community establishment: Foster a community of users to support and scale the platform.

Managing internal competition and politics: Navigate the internal dynamics to ensure a smooth implementation.

Prioritizing developer experience and solving the right challenges

The success of platform engineering hinges on prioritizing developer experience. Engaging early adopters and continuously improving based on their feedback is vital. There are some key strategies you might want to consider.

• Building strong connections with users: Understand how your developers interact with technology and identify their unique challenges based on cooperation, pairing activities, forming virtual teams, and more.
• Focusing on major wins: Center on solving the most impactful problems for the majority of users, avoiding the trap of catering to a vocal minority.
• Collecting structured feedback: Implement processes for gathering and acting on feedback facilitated by a dedicated product manager.

Product managers as a crucial part of the adoption process

Product managers are critical in steering platform engineering initiatives. They take on responsibilities that enable the growing preference for a product-led approach to platform engineering. In other words, they become a vital connection between developers and stakeholders during the process.

• Researching user challenges: Continuously exploring the problem space to understand user needs.
• Building relationships: Engaging with stakeholders inside and outside the organization to gather insights and support.
• Synthesizing insights: Turning feedback into actionable work to guide platform development.
• Managing stakeholders: Ensuring strategic alignment and advocating for the platform within the organization.
• Planning and coordinating the adoption process of the platform.

Building a Community is vital for adoption success

A vibrant community within your organization is essential for platform success. Let’s go through some strategies to build and maintain this community.

• Regular communication: Use newsletters, show-and-tell sessions, and demos to keep users informed.
• Two-way feedback: Engage in direct conversations with user champions to gather valuable insights.
• Contribution model: Encourage users to improve documentation, request features, and optimize the platform.
• Request-for-comments (RFC) process: Use RFCs to manage complex decision points and gather feedback.
• Customer engagement: Establish a process for understanding user requirements and ensuring their needs are met.

Navigating multiple platforms in large organizations

In large organizations, multiple platforms may exist. To avoid duplication and competition, you may take certain steps. 

• Consolidate platforms: Integrate or deprecate less strategic platforms to streamline efforts.
• Unified governance model: Establish consistent technology choices and operating models.

Collaboration over competition: Encourage teams to work together to maximize the platform's effectiveness.

Best practices for successful adoption

Although we've explored many ways to help your organization adopt platform engineering, here are several additional factors that can enhance platform adoption.

• Technology integrations: Provide out-of-the-box support for common integrations to save time.
• Ease of adoption: Lower entry barriers to make the platform easy to use from the start.
• Observability and autonomy: Empower users with tools to operate their workloads independently.
• Self-service capabilities: Automate day-one activities to allow users to self-serve platform capabilities.
• High availability and disaster recovery: Ensure the platform is reliable and secure to build trust.
• Centralized security and compliance: Automatically comply with security standards to reduce user effort.

4 - Platform engineering adoption in phases

Platform adoption can be viewed in phases, each requiring different strategies.

Phase 1: Early adoption

• Focus on innovators and early adopters: Start with a limited number of proactive teams willing to experiment and provide feedback.
• Executive sponsorship: Secure support from the earliest stages to ensure dedicated time and resources.
• Regular check-ins: Monitor progress and address common issues to build a solid foundation.

Phase 2: Bridging the adoption gaps

• Showcase successes: Use early adopter success stories to drive broader acceptance.
• Demonstrate reliability: Build trust by ensuring the platform's reliability.
• Structured onboarding and support: Establish processes to scale user onboarding and support.

Phase 3: Late adoption

• Engage skeptics and laggards: Use executive support to drive adoption among teams resistant to change.

Continuous improvement: Maintain a focus on enhancing the platform based on user feedback.

5 - The implementation process of platform engineering

Implementing platform engineering involves several critical steps.

Step 1: Understanding fundamentals

• Explore existing technology: Understand current processes and technology to define platform boundaries.
• Communicate early: Inform the organization about the initiative to avoid competition and friction.
• Make sound technology choices: Select technologies based on the organization's needs and existing landscape.

Step 2: Design the concept model

• Focus on key areas: Aim for 80% of use cases, avoiding costly edge cases.
• Run spikes and RFCs: Validate assumptions and gather feedback.
• Create a design document: Ensure architectural alignment and executive buy-in.

Step 3: Build and validate the prototype

• Set scope and expectations: Define outcomes and timelines to manage risk.
• Engage early adopters: Work closely with an initial team to gather feedback and validate the platform.
• Deliver a prototype: Aim to deliver within six months to validate and pivot as needed.

Step 4: Mature for general availability

• Optimize costs: Implement cost management models.
• Achieve operational excellence: Focus on automation, release management, and support.

Adjust team structure: Ensure the platform team is equipped to handle the new phase.

Conclusion

Adopting platform engineering can transform your organization's development processes, delivering significant business value through economies of scale, improved developer experience, and operational efficiencies. By understanding the right time to adopt platform engineering, involving stakeholders early, and following a phased approach, you ensure a successful implementation. 

Leadership should actively drive change and manage any friction, ensuring a smooth transition. Involve your team in shaping the roadmap and prioritizing the right feature requests, allowing their expertise to guide decisions. Encourage their active engagement in support activities to thoroughly explore the problem space. 

Support the team in advocating for the platform within the organization, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation. Building a strong user community will further enhance the platform's effectiveness, making it a vital part of your organization's strategic success.