Driving and Measuring the Impact of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering has emerged as a critical discipline in modern software organizations, but its success and impact are often difficult to measure. According to Sergiu Petean, who shared insights at Dev Summit Munich, platform engineering must be approached from a socio-technical perspective, shaped by all stakeholders rather than just developers. "Everybody consumes some kind of platform behind the business and the system of work, because that's where efficiency comes from," Petean explains.

The Challenge of Measuring Platform Success

In financial sectors, organizations have clear KPIs for measuring initiative success. Unfortunately, this clarity doesn't extend to platform engineering in most technical organizations. "Just ask any leader behind a technical platform how successful his platform is and how it compares with his peers. You'll be amazed," Petean notes.

Platform success is often measured from a single stakeholder perspective using standard engineering metrics like onboarding time, deployment frequency, lead time, and mean time to recovery. However, these metrics rarely capture the holistic impact across all stakeholders. "The financial and strategic capabilities and impact, where the future of innovation is actually written, are rarely measured," Petean emphasizes.

Defining Platform Engineering

Petean defines platform engineering as "a socio-technical set of practices that prioritises experience over tool-selection freedom to better serve the whole organisation." This definition highlights that platform engineering isn't just about technology choices but about creating an experience that enables the entire organization.

The technology stack for a platform is determined by the forces and stakeholders involved. In many cases, the strongest stakeholders aren't developers but rather security teams, compliance officers, executive leadership, and transformation offices. "All of them became strong and continuous design partners," Petean shares from his experience.

The Five Pillars of Platform Teams

A successful platform team is driven by five key elements:

1. Vision: Clear direction for where the platform is heading
2. Talent: The right people with the necessary skills
3. Mission: The purpose the platform serves
4. Stakeholders: Those who rely on and influence the platform
5. Principles: The guiding rules that endure change

While the first four elements are increasingly addressed, Petean argues that the community needs to focus more on principles. "For principles to resist time and change, they have to be well-balanced and ideally holistically expressed," he explains. "The already existing organisational and cultural principles need to be in harmony with the team's and personal principles."

The Importance of Documented Principles

Writing down principles and mission statements is crucial for platform teams. These documents build and conserve team culture and identity. "We defined our internal and external identity and continuously adapted our internal and external topology to better serve our product stakeholders," Petean shares. "We embraced change, everywhere, with one exception: Principles."

These documented principles help teams navigate change while maintaining consistency. As a value-stream team, they built a future-proof platform enabling teams to write, deploy, monitor, and maintain their own production environments. "We changed the whole software release process and democratised it," Petean states. Their DevOps motto became: "You build it. You run it, but never alone."

Driving Change in Organizations

When asked about his approach to driving change, Petean emphasizes ownership as the first condition for change to happen. "A team needs to fully own the knowledge behind the change object," he explains. "When change applies to something extremely complicated, such as a global platform (and its operating model), the internal talent and holistic perspective are critical."

Executive support is equally important. "They need to invest in both culture (which does not come for free) and safety (any major change comes with a potential major risk)," Petean adds.

Measuring Platform Impact

Measuring impact was a key principle from day one for Petean's team. "We decided to measure everything we were building," he recalls. "Our impact KPIs became more and more important as we started serving more stakeholders and having a bigger impact."

These metrics became particularly valuable when facing organizational challenges. "Later, when the European IT Cost Center 'curse' found us, our impact KPIs became our best allies," Petean explains.

For example, when a CFO demands cost reductions and questions the size of the platform team, while the COO requires 100% compliance readiness, the platform team can demonstrate the correlation between their work and compliance outcomes. "Your COO will become your best supporter in keeping your team intact as long as there is a clear correlation between compliance and the Platform team," Petean notes.

Practical Approaches to Platform Engineering Measurement

Based on Petean's experience, here are practical approaches to measuring platform engineering impact:

1. Holistic Metrics: Develop metrics that capture impact across all stakeholder groups, not just engineering teams.

2. Principle-Based Measurement: Align metrics with your documented principles to ensure they reflect what truly matters.

3. Stakeholder-Specific Dashboards: Create different views of platform value for different stakeholder groups (finance, security, compliance, etc.).

4. Value Correlation: Explicitly demonstrate how platform work contributes to organizational priorities and strategic goals.

5. Continuous Measurement: Make measurement an ongoing practice rather than a periodic assessment.

The Path Forward

Platform engineering continues to evolve as organizations recognize its strategic importance. By adopting a socio-technical approach, documenting clear principles, and implementing comprehensive measurement practices, platform teams can demonstrate their value and secure the necessary support for continued investment.

As Petean's experience shows, successful platform engineering isn't just about technology—it's about creating an ecosystem that enables all stakeholders to achieve their goals while maintaining technical excellence and organizational alignment.

About the Author

Ben Linders runs a one-person business in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. Author of "Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives," "Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives," "What Drives Quality," "The Agile Self-assessment Game," "Problem? What Problem?", and "Continuous Improvement." Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game. As an adviser, coach, and trainer, he helps organizations by deploying effective software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development. Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean and Quality, and a frequent speaker and writer. He shares his experience in a bilingual blog (Dutch and English) and as an editor for Agile at InfoQ. Follow him on twitter: @BenLinders.

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