Platform Engineering: Building an Internal Developer Platform That Teams Actually Use

A platform team spent 6 months building an internal developer platform that nobody used, learning that top-down mandates fail. By adopting a 'paved road' approach—offering standard tools while allowing unsupported alternatives—they reduced deployment time from 2 weeks to 4 hours. Developer satisfaction NPS jumped from -10 to +52, and change failure rate dropped from 18% to 4%.