As cloud-native tooling has grown, so has the number of things a product developer is expected to know: containers, pipelines, policies, secrets, observability. Platform engineering responds by packaging these concerns into self-service capabilities.
Paved roads, not gates
A good platform offers templates and golden paths that make the secure, compliant option the easiest one. Teams can still step off the road when they need to, but most will not want to.
- Service templates with CI/CD, logging and security pre-configured
- Self-service environments created in minutes
- A developer portal that documents services and owners
Measure what developers feel
Delivery metrics such as lead time and change failure rate matter, but so does developer feedback. Treat the platform as a product with users, and prioritise its roadmap the same way.