There’s a powerful and relatable story that plays out in many organizations. It often starts with a conversation, perhaps one with a new director of engineering, flush with enthusiasm and a grand vision. They detail a future-state "modern platform," complete with the latest and greatest tooling, all designed to make the company a genuine technology leader. This vision is often driven by a core belief - an unspoken assumption - that "if you build it, they will come."
This mindset has a name: "Field of dreams fallacy". It is the central pillar supporting "ivory tower platform engineering" and is a common and seductive trap. It’s usually born from good intentions: a desire for technical excellence and modernization. But it is rooted in a fundamentally flawed perspective.
Starting with a technology-first approach is fundamentally broken. It inverts the proper order of operations, prioritizing the solution before understanding the problem. This inversion is not a harmless misstep; it is a direct path to wasted resources, poor adoption rates, and the erosion of trust between the platform team and its users.
The most successful platform teams don't start with a vision of a "modern" platform. They start by focusing on real-world problems of their internal customers.
This article explains why the ivory tower fails and offers a clear, customer-centric alternative. Shifting from a technology-first to a customer-first approach is the key to driving adoption, eliminating waste, and becoming a true strategic enabler.
The four sins of ivory tower engineering
This flawed, top-down approach is not just inefficient; it is actively harmful. It consistently contains four critical flaws that undermine the platform team's mission.
It ignores the customer
Before a single line of code is written, a successful team must precisely define its "customer". For an internal platform team, this customer base is diverse: it includes product engineers, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), data scientists, and anyone else who must consume the platform's services to do their job. The ivory tower approach fails at this first step by designing and building in a vacuum.
This is analogous to a B2C company designing a new product without ever talking to a consumer. Imagine a hardware company spending millions to develop a new gadget based solely on what its engineers think is "cool," without a single focus group, user interview, or market survey. The product would risk launching into a market that probably didn't need it.
This is what can happen inside an organization. The inevitable outcome is a platform that solves problems few or none have in their day-to-day work. The team delivers a complex, "modern" service orchestration tool when the developers' real, daily pain could be, for example, a CI/CD pipeline that takes 40 minutes to run.
It creates massive waste and opportunity cost
The most obvious result of building an unnecessary product is the direct cost. Every engineering hour, every salary dollar spent building a feature that doesn't solve a real problem is a waste.
But the true, hidden cost is the opportunity cost. While the platform team is busy polishing its "ivory tower," what real, high-friction problems could have been solved instead?.
Those same engineering hours could have been dedicated to fixing the problems that developers genuinely complain about. They could have been used to improve CI/CD times, drastically reducing the feedback loop for product teams. They could have been spent reducing toil for a critical system, freeing up SREs to work on proactive reliability. They could have been invested in enhancing platform reliability, preventing the next costly outage.
This is the true cost. It’s not just the money spent, but it's the value that was left on the table.
It relies on the myth of immediate adoption
The "Field of Dreams Fallacy" is built on the naive belief that "engineers will see the value and start using it". This fundamentally misunderstands human nature and, more specifically, inertia.
Engineers are not idle. They are busy. They are focused on their own deadlines and deliverables. They have a backlog of features to build and bugs to fix. Their existing workflows, while potentially imperfect, are known and functional. To ask them to stop, learn a new tool, and migrate their services is to ask them to take on a significant switching cost. This cost is not just a line item in a budget; it's a cost paid in time, cognitive load, and risk.
For a developer to justify paying that switching cost, the value proposition for the new tool cannot be merely incremental. It must be significant. It must solve a burning, obvious, and painful problem.
A platform that simply offers a cleaner UI on top of existing functionality will have a hard time getting traction. A platform that cuts a 40-minute build time down to 5 minutes will have developers breaking down the door to get access.
It erodes trust and credibility
This is the most insidious and long-term damage. When a platform team consistently delivers features that are not needed, they are seen as being disconnected from reality. Their "customers" begin to view them not as enablers, but as a roadblock or irrelevant.
This loss of credibility creates a vicious cycle. The next time the platform team has an initiative, even one that is genuinely valuable and based on real feedback, they will be met with skepticism. Getting buy-in for future projects becomes an uphill battle. Budgets are harder to secure. Talented engineers leave the team, frustrated that their work has no impact.
Trust, once lost, is incredibly difficult to rebuild. The platform team is left to be a "cost center" rather than the strategic force multiplier it should be.
From visionary to problem-solver
If the ivory tower were a disease, the antidote would be a radical shift in perspective: from a "visionary" to a "problem-solver". This requires abandoning the technology-first mindset and embracing a product mindset, with a culture of customer obsession.
The guiding principle: Start with "why?"
The single most powerful tool for any platform leader is the simple, three-letter question: "Why?". This question must become the gate for all new work. Every proposed feature, every epic, every new tool must first provide a clear and compelling answer to three sub-questions:
- What problem does this solve? (Problem validation)
- For whom does it solve it? (Customer persona)
- Why is it urgent? (Business-value prioritization)
If a new initiative can't pass this test, it doesn't get built. This simple framework forces the team to validate the problem before designing the solution.
How to become a customer-obsessed platform team
To find the "why," you cannot wait for developers to come to you. You must actively go to them. This involves three key practices:
- Go to the Gemba: "Gemba" is a Japanese term that in lean manufacturing means "the place where value is created." For a platform team, this means embedding with product teams to observe their workflows firsthand. Don't just ask them what's wrong; watch them work. You'll discover the hacks, workarounds, and undocumented friction points that they've internalized as "just the way things are." These observations are very important.
- Conduct user interviews: You must regularly talk to other engineers. But don't ask, "What tools should we build?" That's your job. Instead, ask open-ended questions that uncover pain. The single best question is: "What is the most frustrating part of your workflow?". Then, be quiet and listen. The patterns that emerge from these conversations will become your roadmap.
- Analyze the data: Qualitative feedback from interviews is powerful, but it must be backed by quantitative data. Look for patterns of pain in your existing data streams. Analyze support tickets: What are the most common requests and complaints? Study incident retrospectives: What are the recurring root causes that a platform-level solution could fix?. Implement and track developer satisfaction surveys (DSAT) and DORA metrics to get a hard baseline for developer productivity and happiness. This data turns anecdotes into evidence.
Redefining success: From "features shipped" to "value delivered"
A customer-obsessed team must be measured differently. The "ivory tower" measures success by "features shipped". This is a vanity metric that measures output, not outcome.
A successful platform team must redefine its metrics to focus on "value delivered". This means proposing new, customer-centric Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
- Adoption Rate: What percentage of teams are using the new capability? If you build it and no one uses it, it has zero value.
- Developer Satisfaction (DSAT): Are developers happier and more productive? Are their survey scores improving because of the platform?
- Time-to-Value: This is the ultimate metric. How quickly are product teams able to deliver value to external customers using your platform? Are you making the entire organization faster and more agile?
Build the platform your organization needs to win
All platform teams face this core conflict: a choice between a technology-first or a customer-first approach.
The technology-first path leads to the ivory tower. It builds a "fancy" platform: a technically interesting, "modern" artifact that solves no one's problems, drains resources, and erodes trust.
The customer-first path leads to a true strategic advantage. It starts by obsessing over the user. It finds their most urgent, painful problems and solves them. This approach builds a platform that engineers want to use because it makes their lives demonstrably better. This is how a platform team stops being a cost center and becomes a strategic enabler that accelerates the entire business.
The main takeaway is simple: the goal is not to build the platform you personally want. The goal is to build the platform your organization needs to achieve its business goals.
Stop building. Stop designing. Go and ask "Why?". Make this question the immovable foundation of your platform strategy.
