Platform engineering is a relatively new and evolving field in the tech industry. While some tech giants have popularized the 'move fast and break things' mentality, this approach is not always suitable for platform engineering, especially in regulated or complex environments. However, like any evolving field, it comes with its share of challenges. Common mistakes in platform engineering include a lack of a product mindset, over-engineering, and a failure to involve developers and gather feedback. If overlooked, these issues can limit its effectiveness.
In this blog post, we dive deep into these common missteps and provide actionable insights to overcome them, so that your platform engineering efforts are both successful and sustainable.
Platform Engineering refers to providing foundational tools and services to the development team that allow them to quickly and safely deliver their applications. The need for platform engineering and how it is implemented can differ significantly based on the size and structure of the company. This aims to increase developer productivity by providing a unified technical platform to streamline the process which helps reduce errors and enhance reliability.
The core component of Platform Engineering is IDP, i.e. centralized collections of tools, services, and automated workflows that enable developers to self-serve resources needed for building, testing, and deploying applications. By enabling developer self service, IDPs empower developers to deliver faster by reducing reliance on other teams, automating repetitive tasks, reducing the risk of errors, and ensuring every application adheres to organizational standards. Additionally, IDPs often support cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes and microservices, enabling scalable and flexible development environments.
The platform engineering team consists of platform engineers who are responsible for building, maintaining, and configuring the IDP. Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are centralized collections of tools, services, and automated workflows that enable developers to self-serve resources needed for building, testing, and deploying applications. The platform engineering team standardizes workflows, automates repetitive tasks, and ensures that developers have access to the necessary tools and resources. The aim is to create a seamless experience for developers. Hence, allowing them to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure.
Platform engineering focuses on the importance of standardizing processes and automating infrastructure management. This includes creating paved roads for common development tasks such as deployment scripts, testing, and scaling to simplify workflows and reduce friction for developers. While automation and standardization streamline many tasks, infrastructure teams continue to play a crucial role in managing complex systems and troubleshooting issues that require specialized expertise. Curating a catalog of resources, following predefined templates, and establishing best practices ensure that every deployment follows the same standards, thus enhancing consistency across development efforts while allowing flexibility for individual preferences.
Many organizations have found success by adopting continuous improvement practices in their platform engineering efforts.
Platform engineering is an iterative process, requiring ongoing assessment and enhancement based on developer feedback and changing business needs. Gathering user feedback helps platform engineers discover the needs of all stakeholders. This results in continuous improvement that ensures the platform evolves to meet the demands of its users and incorporates new technologies and practices as they emerge.
Security is a key component of platform engineering. Integrating security best practices into the platform such as automated vulnerability scanning, encryption, and compliance monitoring is the best way to protect against vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. This proactive approach is integrated into all stages of the platform helps mitigate risks associated with software delivery and fosters a secure development environment.
One of the common mistakes platform engineers make is focusing solely on dashboards without addressing the underlying issues that need solving. While dashboards provide a good overview, they can lead to a superficial understanding of problems instead of encouraging genuine process improvements. Dashboards should be used as tools to help solve real developer pain points, not just to present data.
To avoid this, teams must combine dashboards with automated alerts, tracing, and log analysis to get actionable insights and a more comprehensive observability strategy for faster incident detection and resolution.
Developing a platform based on assumptions ends up not addressing real problems and does not meet the developers’s needs. Platforms should be designed with the needs of most developers in mind to ensure broad adoption and satisfaction. The platform may lack important features for developers leading to dissatisfaction and low adoption.
Hence, establishing clear objectives and success criteria vital for guiding development efforts. Engage with developers now and then. Conduct surveys, interviews, or workshops to gather insights into their pain points and needs before building the platform.
Building an overlay complex platform hinders rather than helps development efforts. Introducing a new platform can sometimes lead to overengineering if not carefully managed, resulting in unnecessary complexity and features that aren’t needed or used by developers. This leads to increased maintenance costs and confusion among developers that further hampers their productivity.
The goal must be finding the right balance between functionality and simplicity. Hence, ensuring the platform effectively meets the needs of developers without unnecessary complications and iterating it based on actual usage and feedback.
The belief that a single platform caters to all development teams and uses cases uniformly is a fallacy. Different teams and applications have varying needs, workflows, and technology stacks, necessitating tailored solutions rather than a uniform approach. As a result, the platform may end up being too rigid for some teams and overly complex for some resulting in low adoption and inefficiencies.
For example, a company implemented a one-size-fits-all platform that failed to support both their frontend and backend teams, leading to frustration and poor platform adoption.
Hence, design a flexible and customizable platform that adapts to diverse requirements. This allows teams to tailor the platform to their specific workflows while maintaining shared standards and governance.
Spending excessive time in the planning phase leads to delays in implementation, missed opportunities, and not fully meeting the evolving needs of end-users. When the teams focus on perfecting every detail before implementation it results in the platform remaining theoretical instead of delivering real value.
An effective way is to create a balance between planning and executing by adopting an iterative approach. In other words, focus on delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and continuously improving it based on real user feedback. This allows the platform to evolve in alignment with actual developer needs which ensures better adoption and more effective outcomes.
Building the platform without incorporating security measures from the beginning can create opportunities for cyber threats and attacks. This also exposes the organization to compliance risks, vulnerabilities, and potential breaches that could be costly to resolve.
Implementing automated security tools, such as identity and access management (IAM), encrypted communications, and code analysis tools helps continuously monitor for security issues and ensure compliance with best practices. Besides this, provide ongoing security training that covers common vulnerabilities, secure coding practices, and awareness of evolving threats.
In contemporary software engineering ecosystems, implementing your internal developer platform (IDP) as a product-centric solution—rather than merely a collection of disparate tools or shared services—constitutes a fundamental requirement for constructing a robust platform that genuinely empowers engineering teams across the organization. Adopting a product-oriented methodology in platform engineering involves strategically positioning the developer experience at the core of every architectural decision, ensuring that platform teams maintain laser focus on resolving authentic pain points, optimizing development workflows, and delivering measurable business value through systematic implementation.
A platform-as-product approach initiates with comprehensive understanding that diverse developer personas and product teams maintain distinct operational requirements and constraints. Most enterprises operate with heterogeneous user bases, and monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions frequently result in suboptimal adoption rates, resource wastage, and elevated cognitive load for development practitioners. Instead, platform engineering teams should establish continuous feedback mechanisms—systematically gathering developer insights through structured interviews, comprehensive surveys, and detailed usage analytics—to identify the most critical pain points and prioritize feature development that delivers substantial value propositions.
One of the most effective methodologies for reducing cognitive overhead and enhancing developer productivity involves providing golden paths: pre-configured, best-practice workflows and toolchains that guide developers through standardized task execution patterns. Golden paths facilitate automation of repetitive operational tasks, ensure compliance security adherence, and enable developers to concentrate on core code development rather than grappling with infrastructure complexities or operational overhead. By delivering self-service capabilities—such as automated infrastructure provisioning through Terraform modules or streamlined deployment orchestration utilizing Helm charts—platform teams can enable accelerated delivery cycles with reduced human resource dependencies.
A product-centric mindset necessitates treating the platform as a continuously evolving solution architecture. The platform engineering journey represents an iterative process that requires ongoing refinement to accommodate emerging technologies, shifting business requirements, and the dynamic needs of engineering teams. Successful platform engineering initiatives prioritize continuous improvement methodologies, leveraging developer feedback data and metrics from developer portals or CI systems to refine workflows, integrate essential tooling, and deprecate features that no longer serve the target user base effectively.
Many platform teams encounter common implementation pitfalls, including developing features based on unvalidated assumptions, excessive engineering complexity, or implementing top-down approaches that exclude end-user participation in the design process. By transitioning to a product-oriented mindset, platform engineering teams can circumvent these architectural mistakes and instead concentrate on delivering seamless developer experiences that drive adoption metrics and productivity improvements. This methodology also ensures that compliance and security frameworks are architected into the platform foundation from initial implementation, rather than being integrated as post-deployment additions.
Ultimately, adopting a product mindset in platform engineering focuses on creating adaptive platform architectures that evolve symbiotically with organizational growth, address authentic developer requirements, and support enterprise business objectives through systematic enablement. A successful platform should improve time to market, reduce costs, and increase innovation. By emphasizing self-service automation capabilities and continuous feedback integration, platform teams can construct internal developer platforms that streamline development processes, optimize operational efficiency, and empower development practitioners to innovate effectively—transforming the platform into a comprehensive engine for software delivery optimization and organizational success metrics.
When used correctly, platform engineering offers many benefits:
Typo is an effective platform engineering tool that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Platform engineering has immense potential to streamline development and improve efficiency, but avoiding common pitfalls is key. Showcasing success stories can build confidence and encourage wider adoption of the platform. By focusing on the pitfalls mentioned above, you can create a platform that drives productivity and innovation.
All the best! :)
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