Hey there,
It is clear now how to approach platform engineering.
One of my favorite poems of Rainer Maria Rilke is about patience. The original reads: “Man muss den Dingen  die eigene, stille  ungestörte Entwicklung lassen,  die tief von innen kommt  und durch nichts gedrängt  oder beschleunigt werden kann,  alles ist austragen – und  dann gebären… It’s losing a little bit of its beauty if translated into english but would mean something along the lines of
One should let things
have their own, silent
undisturbed development,
that comes deeply from within
and cannot be forced
or accelerated by anything.
All is full-born
and then
Bear…
This is how you should approach platform engineering. Don’t force it, let it evolve. Don’t tell your manager your platform will have 80% estate coverage in a year. It won’t. Not even 50%. It might be in three years, if you give things their own, silent and undisturbed development.
While it’s important you don’t think too much and get your MVP in weeks, I don’t think people understand how slow you should go in platform engineering after that phase. Take 4-8 weeks to refine your Minimum Viable Platform. Take up solid 3 months to refine the platform to optimally work for a single team. Build something that is 10X better than what this team is losing right now. Platform Teams are like startups. Paul Grahams “early on do things that don’t scale” applies.
At the end of this phase you want to have a handful of fans. Napoleon once famously said: 10 people who yell make more noise than 10,000 who keep silent. This is true for happy people and unhappy people. Get 10 happy users and you’re good. We’re five months in, you’re getting nervous and your managers too. But now you have something that really works and you can measure success. People will line up to get on the platform.
I’ll talk about this at PlatformCon24, will you join me?
Cheers from Northern Germany where it finally stopped snowing and the local wolves have just given birth to a number of cute puppies. I’m supposed to extend their regards to the global platform engineering community and tell you: you rock!
Kaspar
