How to Integrate Platform Engineering Into Your Business

Editor's Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone's 2025 Trend Report, Developer Experience: The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering.

How do we even start approaching platform engineering? The good news is that major organizations that have successfully adopted platform engineering have contributed their insights, best practices, and lessons learned to frameworks like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) Platform Maturity Model and Microsoft's Platform Engineering Capability Model. These models provide a structured pathway for organizations to evaluate their current state and identify gaps and actionable steps toward building an effective internal developer platform (IDP).

By following the practices of these models, you can create a roadmap for your platform engineering journey, starting with small, impactful improvements that gradually drive adoption across your organization, resulting in a unified and optimized platform. The following is an actionable checklist designed to guide the initial steps of integrating platform engineering into your business. Note that this checklist should not be treated dogmatically but rather as a flexible starting point to define your approach.

1. Ensure Change Readiness and Cultural Alignment

Platform engineering is not only about technology; to be successful in your platform engineering journey, it is critical to prioritize people, processes, and culture alongside technology:

• Foster a culture of collaboration, open communication, and adaptability within the organization
• Instate change management strategies to address resistance and ease transitions
• Actively encourage experimentation and foster an environment where teams learn and adapt
• Communicate a compelling vision for platform engineering that aligns with the organization's values, processes, and tools

2. Gain Organizational Buy-In

Getting buy-in from stakeholders and teams can be challenging, especially for large projects or when shifting strategies significantly. Focus on developing compelling strategies that align with your audience's motivations and goals:

• Identify key stakeholders (developers, operations, management, security, etc.); understand their priorities and concerns
• Align the platform engineering initiative with the identified priorities
• [For executives] Emphasize business outcomes like product success and overall business growth via increased innovation, reduced time to market, and operational efficiency
• [For engineering teams] Highlight automated workflows and reduced tooling frustrations
• Use metrics to build your case, such as projected gains in deployment speed or reduced ticket volumes
• Present early success metrics (e.g., increased developer satisfaction, faster deployment cycles) and address any concerns transparently
• Create a value map connecting platform engineering actions (e.g., automating infra provisioning) to business outcomes
• Pilot a thin slice of the platform with a small team to demonstrate impact
• Actively collect feedback and communicate progress regularly with visual comparisons to keep stakeholders engaged and aligned

3. Assess Current State of DevOps Practices

Insights into your DevOps practices not only help secure leadership buy-in but also serve as a foundation for developing a strategic platform engineering roadmap:

• Evaluate key areas like IaC, automation, developer self-service, and policy enforcement (i.e., assess whether your IaC is well-standardized and if developers can leverage automated workflows to provision resources)
• Identify bottlenecks, recurring pain points, and areas for improvement
• Use the CNCF Maturity Model to map your practices across its levels, identifying gaps such as siloed teams or manual workflows
• Pair this with quantifiable metrics like time to value, onboarding efficiency, and DORA metrics to measure inefficiencies and performance issues

• Clearly define roles to focus on designing, maintaining, and iterating on the IDP, distinct from application development efforts
• Treat the platform as a product by conducting user research, gathering feedback, and refining features to meet developer needs
• Secure a dedicated budget and ensure the team has the tools, training, and cultural support needed to drive platform adoption
• Give a descriptive name to the team to distinguish from other product development teams, such as:
  • Engineering Enablement
  • Developer Experience
  • Shared Tools
  • Centre-of-Excellence

7. Adopt a Thin Platform Approach and Avoid Overengineering

Adopting a thin platform approach ensures that your platform evolves organically while avoiding unnecessary complexity. This approach balances rapid adoption with long-term scalability and alignment to organizational goals:

• Build a minimum viable product (MVP) with only the essential services and capabilities needed to streamline repetitive development tasks
• Focus the MVP on simplicity, usability, and supporting a single "golden path" for consistent developer experiences
• Design the initial platform with basic resources and features that span the technical estate, avoiding overengineering
• Avoid adding unnecessary features early on to prevent overwhelming users and complicating workflows
• Create a central catalog for all provisioned infrastructure and resources tied to golden paths to enable visibility and governance
• Embed security and compliance practices, such as Security as Code and Policy as Code, directly into the platform's design from the start
• Share an internal roadmap highlighting current platform value, future milestones, and goals to align organizational priorities
• Refine the platform in a Beta stage by testing foundational capabilities, improving quality, and productizing features for production use
• Use pilot user groups to test updates and new features in controlled environments to gather feedback and minimize disruptions before broader rollouts
• Apply the thinnest viable platform (TVP) mindset at every stage to focus on sustainable growth and avoid unnecessary complexity

8. Drive Platform Adoption

Driving platform adoption requires more than just building a technically sound product — it demands cultivating trust, voluntary collaboration with platform champions, and open feedback channels with the dev teams and stakeholders:

Launch a pilot program with a small group of enthusiastic developers to test the platform and provide actionable feedback

• Offer early adopters comprehensive training, clear documentation, and responsive support to quickly resolve issues
• Use the pilot phase to refine the platform, address pain points, and build trust with users
• Communicate the platform’s value proposition through KPIs and practical examples that showcase simplified workflows, increased productivity, and faster value delivery
• Assign a "platform champion" in each development team to advocate for the platform and demonstrate its time-saving and efficiency-boosting benefits
• Build developer trust by avoiding mandates to use the platform and, instead, foster voluntary engagement and collaboration
• Recognize that adoption is gradual and work closely with developers to encourage buy-in and commitment
• Maintain open feedback channels like office hours, forums, or surveys to continuously gather insights from users and platform champions
• Act on user feedback to iteratively improve the platform and address developer concerns
• Leverage platform champions to share success stories and advocate for broader adoption within the organization

9. Measure and Iterate for Success

Effective measurement and continuous iteration are the cornerstones of a successful platform engineering strategy, enabling organizations to align their platforms with evolving needs:

Define actionable and reproducible KPIs tailored to your organization’s unique needs and platform objectives

• Measure success with KPIs like deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate, mean time to recovery (DORA metrics), developer satisfaction scores, platform adoption rates, and security compliance scores
• Use tools like net promoter score (NPS) surveys to gauge developer sentiment and identify opportunities for improvement
• Gather feedback regularly from developers and stakeholders to refine adoption strategies and address evolving needs
• Create dashboards to visualize metrics, improve communication, and enhance transparency for all stakeholders
• Use dashboards to monitor platform usage, pinpoint bottlenecks, and analyze developer interaction patterns for actionable insights
• Incorporate advanced analytics to assess the platform's impact on business outcomes and support precise ROI calculations
• Leverage predictive analytics to anticipate future platform needs, aligning development with usage trends and organizational goals
• Continuously iterate on the platform based on insights from KPIs, feedback, and analytics to ensure it remains relevant and valuable
• Share progress and a data-driven roadmap with stakeholders to maintain alignment and build trust in the platform's value

Conclusion

As you embark on your platform engineering journey, remember there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Customize the approaches and strategies presented in this checklist to suit your organization's needs, and remain agile as both the platform and its requirements evolve. With a clear vision, leadership buy-in, change sponsors, a dedicated platform team, platform champions, voluntary developer engagement, open feedback channels, and a data-driven approach, you can build an IDP that delivers business value and increases innovation across your organization.

This is an excerpt from DZone's 2025 Trend Report, Developer Experience: The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering. 

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