Part 3: Scaling Engineering Platforms

Imagine your platform team has built a rock-solid internal developer platform that works beautifully for five teams. It’s reliable, fast, and everyone’s happy. Then the company doubles in size overnight through an acquisition. Suddenly, your once-sleek platform is straining under the weight. Disparate tools start popping up, support queues swell, carefully designed golden paths are ignored, and developers quietly spin up shadow systems just to keep shipping code. The issue isn’t that the platform was bad; it’s that it didn’t scale with the organization. What once felt elegant now feels brittle, with friction at every turn.

Or take another, subtler scenario. Your platform is technically sound with solid architecture and acceptable uptime and feature-compliant, but developers avoid it. They say it’s too rigid, doesn’t fit their real-world workflows, or feels like more overhead than help. Leadership begins to see it as a cost center rather than a value driver. Here, the missing ingredient is evolution: treating the platform as a living product. That means engaging in user research, building roadmaps, and gathering constant feedback so the platform grows alongside its users’ needs rather than drifting away from them.