Platform engineering is crucial to driving innovation, scaling development, and ensuring seamless integration across organizations. As platform engineers, we often face complex challenges that require strategic solutions, a deep understanding of technology, and the ability to align with broader business goals.
In this article, we share our experiences working within platform engineering and discuss some of the most pressing challenges we’ve encountered, along with practical ways to overcome them. Here’s a closer look at the key issues and insights we’ve gathered through our work.
The Technological Landscape Challenge
Every day, platform engineers must juggle competing demands. They need to provide seamless support to teams using a diverse set of frameworks and technologies. This includes staying current with new releases—keeping an eye on the latest updates in Java, for instance, while assessing security risks and understanding the benefits of upgrading. All the while, they are tasked with making sure the platform operates smoothly for those who may still be working on outdated versions.
This technological spread makes it nearly impossible for platform teams to maintain a unified approach. And the pace of change is relentless. Technology evolves rapidly, and for many companies, their technological maturity lags behind. Without enterprise-wide architecture frameworks or a shared governance model, individual teams are often left to find their own solutions, leading to siloed efforts, repeated mistakes, and missed opportunities to share best practices.
Then there’s the ever-looming risk of vendor lock-in. Once a team commits to a particular technology—whether it’s a cloud provider or a software vendor—backtracking becomes incredibly difficult. Entire systems are built around that technology, locking organizations into a single vendor’s ecosystem. Should you wish to pivot, reuse, or adapt that technology for a different scenario, team, or client, you face the prospect of re-engineering everything from the ground up. It’s a costly and time-consuming endeavor.
So, how do we manage this complexity? The answer lies in creating a product ecosystem—an internal platform where different teams can build, share, and reuse components. This platform becomes the connective tissue, providing a centralized hub where frameworks and technologies are standardized, yet flexible enough to meet the needs of various teams. It’s not just about solving today’s problems; it’s about creating a foundation for future growth and adaptation.
The key is to treat these internal platforms as products in their own right. And like any product, they need to be guided by a portfolio management strategy. That means building roadmaps that define when services should be created, retired, or expanded. These decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Instead, they should be driven by clearly defined metrics for product evaluation. Only introduce new tools or technologies that meet pre-established criteria—criteria based on the company’s long-term goals, not on individual team preferences.
Effective governance is essential. Without it, the platform can spiral into chaos, with teams pulling in different directions. Establish a dedicated committee or group responsible for making strategic decisions about which technologies to adopt, which to sunset, and how to align platform goals with broader organizational objectives. This body should meet regularly, evaluating and approving new technologies based on their alignment with the overall strategy, not just their immediate usefulness to a single team.
Finally, to mitigate the risk of vendor lock-in, teams should consider adopting vendor-agnostic technologies. Tools like Terraform or Doppler provide flexibility by allowing teams to operate across multiple cloud providers without being locked into one. These technologies offer a way to standardize infrastructure while maintaining the freedom to shift between vendors if necessary. It’s a proactive approach that provides a buffer against future constraints.
The User-Centricity Challenge
In platform engineering, there’s an often-overlooked irony: while our platforms are built to serve internal users—developers, data scientists, and other technical teams—understanding those users and their needs can be surprisingly difficult. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about platforms as a collection of technologies rather than as products designed to fulfill specific user needs. But when we lose sight of user-centricity, we risk building platforms that miss the mark, no matter how sophisticated the technology behind them.
The core issue is that platforms are often designed in isolation from their users. We build tools with the assumption that our highly technical users will instinctively know how to navigate the complexity. But the reality is far more nuanced. Developers and data scientists may be comfortable with technical environments, but even they can become overwhelmed by the fractured experience of juggling multiple tools and interfaces. One minute, they’re working in Kubernetes; the next, they’re toggling between Grafana for monitoring and another tool for logs and pipelines. The result is a disjointed, frustrating experience.
It’s here where the true challenge of platform engineering reveals itself: how do we reduce this underlying complexity and deliver a platform that feels seamless, consistent, and intuitive? To do this, we must stop thinking of platforms as a loose collection of technologies and instead view them as products designed with the user at their core.
To build truly user-centric platforms, we need to embrace best practices from user experience (UX) design—a discipline often more associated with customer-facing products. By applying UX principles to internal platform design, we can begin to think about the complete user journey. This means asking ourselves key questions: How do users discover the platform? What does the onboarding process look like? How intuitive is the interface when they start building proof of concepts or deploying new workloads?
One solution that’s proven effective is developing an internal developer portal. By providing a single, cohesive interface, an internal portal allows users to interact with various platform capabilities without having to switch between multiple tools. It simplifies access, reduces the cognitive load, and offers a much more streamlined, consistent user experience. This approach not only makes life easier for developers and data scientists but also ensures that the platform can evolve and scale with minimal friction.
Platform engineering, by its very nature, deals with intricate technologies. But this doesn’t mean that platforms should be difficult to use. We can curate the developer experience by focusing on reducing friction at every turn. One way to achieve this is by implementing the right level of abstraction. The key is to strike a balance—abstract enough to simplify use but not so much that it limits flexibility.
Different organizations, and even different teams within the same organization, will have varying needs for abstraction. The goal is to provide a safety net for users, which includes sensible defaults, resource limits, and a clear “golden path” for common workflows. This ensures that users are protected from making decisions that could introduce instability, especially in heavily regulated environments. By providing these out-of-the-box capabilities, such as built-in compliance tools, we allow users to focus on what they do best—innovating and building—without having to worry about the underlying complexity.
The final hurdle in user-centric platform engineering is the lack of direct feedback. Because internal users are often deeply involved in their own projects, they may not provide the necessary insight into how they use the platform, what obstacles they encounter, or which features they wish existed. Without this feedback, platform teams are left guessing, potentially investing in the wrong areas or missing out on valuable opportunities for improvement.
To overcome this, it’s essential to foster communities of practice around platform usage. Whether it’s developers, data scientists, or other technical teams, creating spaces where users can share their experiences, challenges, and suggestions can lead to a wealth of actionable insights. Beyond this, actively engaging users through surveys, interviews, and focus groups is crucial. We must take the time to understand their usage patterns and pain points, using this data to refine the platform experience continuously.
The Organizational Challenge
For platform engineering teams, one of the most persistent challenges isn’t technical—it’s organizational. As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, platform teams can often find themselves out of sync with the broader goals of their company. The root cause? A lack of visibility into the company’s long-term direction, a misunderstanding of what platform teams should be doing, and a disconnect between platform engineers and the non-technical stakeholders who rely on their work.
Let’s break down the three key organizational challenges and explore how platform teams can better align their efforts with the company’s overall mission.
The Lack of Long-Term Visibility
At the core of every platform team’s success is its ability to understand the company’s strategic roadmap. But far too often, platform teams lack insight into the direction the organization is heading in. What will the company need one, three, or even five years from now? What are the building blocks the platform team must deliver for those future milestones to be met?
Without clarity on these questions, platform teams are left guessing. They may work on urgent, short-term needs at the expense of long-term, high-impact projects. As a result, they might struggle to deliver the essential components that the organization will need in the future, leading to delays, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
The solution is simple, though not always easy to implement: internal alignment. Platform teams need to interface more closely with the rest of the organization. By having a dedicated technical product owner who liaises between platform engineering and development teams, both sides can ensure their roadmaps are in sync. Regular cross-team discussions, where platform teams gain insights into the strategic direction and priorities of the organization, are essential. This ensures that the platform team’s initiatives are not only timely but essential to the company’s future success.
Misconceptions About Platform Teams
There’s a widespread misconception about what platform teams should actually do. Are they supposed to operate in reactive mode, always on hand to fix issues, put out fires, or fulfill one-off requests? Or should they have a proactive, strategic roadmap of their own, contributing to the company’s goals in a structured, predictable way?
This tension can lead to frustration. Platform engineers may feel like they’re constantly playing catch-up, unable to focus on larger, long-term initiatives because they’re overwhelmed by reactive tasks. This not only impacts productivity but also limits the value the platform team can bring to the company.
The solution is to adopt a more defined structure and governance. A platform team should have a clear mission, complete with its own roadmap and internal processes. This allows the team to focus on proactive, value-driven work rather than spending all their time reacting to ad-hoc requests. Setting boundaries and creating a clear team API that outlines responsibilities and expectations can help define the platform team’s role within the organization, allowing it to operate more strategically.
Distrust from Non-Technical Stakeholders
Another common organizational challenge for platform teams is the distrust of platform technologies by non-technical stakeholders. Often, business leaders and other non-technical teams don’t fully understand the value that the platform team brings to the table. They may see the platform as just another cost center, without appreciating its role in driving innovation, improving efficiency, and ensuring system stability.
To bridge this gap, platform teams must consistently showcase their value. This means more than just reporting uptime statistics or infrastructure updates. It involves regularly demonstrating how platform capabilities contribute to the organization’s overall success. One effective way to do this is through internal demos and metrics that quantify the return on investment (ROI) of platform initiatives. For example, by showing how the platform has reduced the cost of cloud workloads through FinOps initiatives or how it has improved security and compliance, the platform team can make a compelling case for its strategic importance.
The User-Centricity Challenge
Platform teams often find themselves dealing with high cognitive loads, forced into firefighting mode, burdened by additional workload outside their core responsibilities, and plagued by a feeling of disconnection from the larger organization. These challenges are not just frustrating—they can erode team morale, hinder productivity, and ultimately prevent platform teams from contributing to their full potential.
High Cognitive Load
Platform engineers are often burdened with a high cognitive load, which is the mental strain caused by managing a vast amount of technical information. This load comes in layers, with engineers needing to stay on top of multiple cloud providers, open-source products, and third-party tools. The complexity is compounded by the fact that platform teams must support diverse tech stacks like .NET, Java, Angular, and a myriad of databases, such as Postgres, Mongo, and Cassandra. All this leads to a large inventory of knowledge that engineers must continuously retain and apply in their day-to-day tasks.
Moreover, cognitive load doesn’t just stem from the technology itself—it also comes from the products running on the platform. Engineers may not always be directly involved in the business processes or rules behind these products, but because of the constant collaboration between product, business, and platform teams, they must often hold business logic in their heads too.
To tackle this, governance plays a crucial role. Standardizing the technology stack, reducing the number of tools for logging and monitoring, and aligning with a limited set of supported technologies can significantly decrease cognitive strain. Additionally, defining team APIs to clarify responsibilities and streamline interactions across teams can help reduce the mental load by establishing clear boundaries and expectations.
Firefighting Mode
A major challenge for platform teams is finding themselves stuck in firefighting mode—constantly responding to incidents and operational issues instead of focusing on building long-term solutions. Teams often have to switch from their proactive work on platform improvements to handle sudden production outages or deal with urgent business requests, pulling them away from their roadmap.
This reactive state not only impacts productivity but also prevents platform teams from advancing the platform’s capabilities in a strategic way. To break free from this cycle, platform teams need to embrace the “you build it, you run it” mindset, where operational responsibility is shared with product and development teams. By shifting more operational tasks to development teams, platform engineers can focus on high-impact projects rather than putting out fires.
Further investment in improving processes and tools—such as automating monitoring and implementing fault tolerance by default—can preempt issues before they escalate, reducing the need for constant firefighting.
Additional Workload
Another hurdle platform engineers face is the ever-increasing additional workload that falls outside of their core responsibilities. This often comes from business units requesting platform teams to build custom capabilities or reports, especially when cloud providers or third-party vendors don’t provide the out-of-the-box features that meet business requirements.
While fulfilling these requests is important, it detracts from the platform team’s primary mission of developing and refining the internal platform. To manage this, platform teams need to establish clear processes for delegation. Responsibilities that fall outside the platform team’s core mission, such as custom business requests, can often be delegated to dedicated business or support teams.
By building a culture of delegation and defining the scope of the platform team’s responsibilities more clearly, platform engineers can prioritize their work more effectively and avoid being overwhelmed by non-core tasks.
Feeling of Disconnectivity
A feeling of disconnection from the larger organization is a common issue among platform teams. Engineers may struggle to see how their work fits into the company’s broader goals, leading to disengagement and higher turnover. Platform engineers often feel that their efforts are not aligned with the company’s mission, vision, or strategic objectives, which can create a sense of isolation from the rest of the organization.
To address this, platform teams must work to align their roadmaps with organizational goals. Whether the company is in a phase of rapid growth or undergoing cost-cutting measures, the platform team’s objectives should reflect and support these larger initiatives. For example, during periods of expansion, the platform should prioritize initiatives that speed up time-to-market for new products. In contrast, during times of financial tightening, the team should focus on implementing FinOps practices to optimize costs and efficiency.
Building internal communities where platform engineers can collaborate with development and business teams can also foster a deeper connection to the organization. Regularly communicating the platform’s contributions to key business outcomes can help combat feelings of disconnection and ensure that platform teams feel valued and aligned with the company’s direction.
Conclusion
Platform engineering is both complex and rewarding, offering unique challenges and opportunities to drive meaningful change within organizations. As we navigate the evolving technological landscape, our focus remains on delivering value through strong governance, user-centric design, and alignment with business goals. By tackling the issues we’ve outlined here, platform teams can become key enablers of growth, innovation, and operational excellence.
DASA Platform Engineering
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