Platform Engineering

by Camille Fournier

You should reinforce this culture of customer empathy through goal setting. Platform teams without a captive audience may complain about adoption as a goal, rightly pointing out that they can’t force users to adopt their products; meanwhile, teams with a captive audience may blame their users for slow growth in adoption, citing lack of engagement or other priorities. Both of these reactions lead to the question: Are you building things that people want? How do you know? How are you making it as easy as possible for people to adopt your offerings? Do you know what the potential customer base looks like, and are you being realistic about who needs and wants this offering? Asking your engineers to measure their success through the eyes of their customers shakes them out of a purely technical mindset and refocuses them on the experience, use cases, and purpose of their systems. Some basic questions to start with include: If your system is supposed to make people more productive, how much time do you think this change will save your users? It’s surprising how many teams claim to improve productivity but neglect to measure what they are planning to improve! How many hours a year do your customers have to spend to keep using this platform (through reacting to upgrades, migrations, etc.)? This can help you spot unattended pain points and friction. Are your support requests about common repeated issues or unusual situations? The easier the system is to use, and the better your docu...