Internal platforms succeed when they have customers, roadmaps, SLOs, and deprecation strategies—just like any product. This means identifying teams with names and goals as your customers. It means building now, next, and later roadmaps driven by interviews and usage data. It means setting SLOs for provisioning time, uptime, and incident rates. It means planning deprecations with clear migrations, dates, and tooling. Most importantly, it means treating adoption as a feature and measuring it accordingly.
We learned this lesson the hard way when we launched an internal platform with compelling presentations but mediocre experience. Adoption crawled despite enthusiastic meeting responses because teams nodded politely then continued existing practices.
What changed wasn’t bigger presentations—it was acting like a product team. We interviewed 12 engineers across 5 teams and discovered their primary pain wasn’t “Kubernetes complexity” but “provisioning takes forever and I don’t trust the defaults.” We made a simple promise: “New service, deployable in under 10 minutes” with no asterisks or fine print.
We built a golden-path template with sensible defaults and single command setup for CI, observability, and deployment targets. We held weekly office hours and paired on the first two services per team. We added a “provisioning time” SLO with live dashboard that started at 45 minutes and eventually reached 7.
Adoption followed not from better evangelism but from reduced friction and obvious success. This taught us that platforms succeed through the same product development cycle used for external products: discovery leading to roadmap leading to launch leading to iteration leading to deprecations.
Discovery involved interviews, onboarding observation, incident reviews, and analyzing “why we forked” discussions. Roadmaps focused on outcomes like “P95 provisioning under 10 minutes” and “TTFV under 5 minutes” rather than features. Launches included golden paths, copy-paste documentation, and brief videos for first deployment. Iteration meant tracking user friction and changing defaults rather than just documentation. Deprecations required early announcement, compatibility layers, automated migration tools, real deadlines, and escalation paths.
We measured weekly active repositories using platform templates or CI pipelines, time-to-first-deploy from template to first successful deployment, provisioning P50 and P95 for new environments, incident rates attributable to platform defaults, and deprecation completion rates per team with public dashboards. When adoption, TTFD, and incident rates moved favorably, the platform earned its investment.
Effective deprecations publish rationale tied to user value like fewer footguns or faster builds. They provide compatibility layers and automated migration tools. They ship migration guides with before-and-after examples and copy-paste commands. They set dates with automated reminders while offering pairing assistance. They track progress publicly and celebrate completing teams.
We stopped abstract arguments about platform value and measured time savings directly. Moving from 45 to 7 minute provisioning saved 38 minutes per environment, which at 200 environments per quarter represented roughly 126 hours. Template-to-deploy in 8 minutes saved a day of pairing per new service. Standardized telemetry reduced incident MTTR by approximately 30% on average. Executives need clear investment payback calculations, not YAML complexity explanations.
The anti-patterns to avoid include field-of-dreams platforms where “if we build it, they will come,” mandatory adoption without support because resentment doesn’t drive growth, documentation as apology instead of better defaults, and chasing infrastructure novelty over boring reliability and speed.
For teams getting started, write the one-sentence promise your platform keeps. Ship a golden path template that scaffolds CI, observability, and deployment in one command. Set SLOs on provisioning and first deploy, then display them publicly. Hold weekly office hours and pair with each team on their first two services. Plan deprecations with shims, codemods, deadlines, and visible progress tracking.