Platform engineering isn't just a technical challenge - it's a political one. Even the best-designed platforms fail without the right influence, alignment, and stakeholder buy-in. At Platform Con 2025 in London, only nine out of 700 attendees raised their hands when asked if they had a great platform. The gap isn't usually technical - it's organizational and cultural.

Main Insights

- Platform resistance stems from fear and self-preservation, not ignorance - address the human side first

- Translate platform work into business language: ROI, risk reduction, and strategic outcomes matter more than technical features

- The platform value loop is a continuous political negotiation, not a one-time technical milestone

- People alignment breaks first at scale, followed by process, then maybe technology

Mallory, a platform therapist and workshop host for the Platform Engineering community, brings a unique perspective shaped by years as a full-stack developer, engineering manager, and technical customer success leader. Her work focuses on the intersection of humans and technology, helping dozens of platforms of all sizes navigate the cultural and organizational challenges that determine success or failure.

You can watch the full discussion here if you missed it.

The hidden tax on disconnected systems

Most organizations don't realize they're paying a massive hidden tax. Developers wait on tickets. Snowflake environment configurations proliferate across teams. Tooling sprawl creates ballooning costs and complexity. Shadow ops work burns people out and creates governance chaos.

These aren't just technical problems - they're symptoms of disconnected systems. And when leadership asks what's slowing the organization down, platform engineers often make a critical mistake: they answer with the technical symptoms instead of the business impact.

"You need to be comfortable saying the things on the right and tying it back to the stuff on the left," Mallory explained, contrasting technical issues like ticket wait times with business impacts like slow time to market. "This is really leadership politics. This is the culture of platform engineering as a whole."

The real question isn't why platforms are valuable - everyone agrees they are. The question is why well-built platforms still trigger pushback from smart, well-intentioned people.

Why good platforms face resistance

Every platform will face resistance, even when well-built. This happens for four primary reasons:

• Platforms change who makes decisions - Control shifts from individuals to systems, which can feel threatening
• They expose hidden inefficiencies - Cultural and organizational problems that were easy to ignore become visible
• They reduce local autonomy - Teams that could do things their own way must now meet standards
• They shift risk - Moving from human-driven manual processes to system-driven automation requires trust

"It's not that people are being ignorant when they push back on a platform," Mallory emphasized. "Generally, that push back comes because there's some level of self-preservation there. You need to have that inside of every single conversation you have about the platform."

This is especially true now, when many software engineers legitimately worry about job security. Any control taken away from individuals and given to a system can feel like an existential risk.

The platform value loop: A political negotiation

Platform engineering isn't a linear technical project - it's a continuous loop that requires influence at every phase. The platform value loop moves from pain point identification to MVP, proof of value to funding and buy-in, production readiness to adoption, continuous improvement back to new pain points.

"Every time you go through this loop, it is a transition that you can think of as a political negotiation, not necessarily a technical milestone," Mallory explained. "Every phase of this value loop requires some level of influence."

What matters isn't understanding every technical detail of each phase. What matters is knowing what decisions each phase requires and who needs to be influential outside the platform team for each phase to succeed.

Speaking the right language to the right people

The biggest mistake beginners make when proposing platform ideas? Not having a clear why. Coming to the table with a solution before understanding the problem and its business impact guarantees failure.

"If you can't explain to me the reason why that idea is so great, why that idea is the thing that should be prioritized, you've not thought it through enough," Mallory said. "The discovery work, the leg work to understand the problem you are trying to solve with platform engineering is so important to do well before you come up with any ideas on how to solve those problems."

The language you use must match your audience. Your head of engineering might understand improvements to Kubernetes operators. Your CTO needs to hear about decreases in on-call issues. Your CEO doesn't care about any of that - they care about time to market, cost, and risk.

Tie platform work to strategic business initiatives:

• Faster service delivery - Self-service golden paths and automation reduce time to market
• Lower operational overhead and risk - Secure defaults, observability, and SLOs build confidence
• Developer satisfaction and retention - Frictionless workflows and better experience retain top talent
• Better compliance posture - Built-in policies, traceability, and audit logs meet regulatory requirements

"It's less about describing the platform as tools and more like an accelerator," Mallory noted. "Having the right conversations, getting the right stakeholders involved and starting to really think about how your platform can drive value and why and explaining that value in the context of why someone should care is going to be very important."

Proving value with ROI and business cases

Platform teams compete for tight budgets. Having clear numbers that substantiate both the investment and the long-term return on investment puts you in a better position than teams with just enthusiasm and exciting demos.

"Having a clear business case, having some level of return on investment calculation even if it is a simple one will help build trust because it shows you're aligned with the business's priorities," Mallory explained. "Things about time, money, and risk are the most important things generally in these discussions."

Treat the platform like a product. That means:

• Strategic, well-planned roadmaps that show forward thinking
• Designated product and platform team roles
• Measurable outcomes and ROI tied to business priorities
• Cross-functional stakeholder groups and maintained relationships
• Clear funding needs backed by evidence

Measuring what matters

Measuring productivity gains and cost savings in large enterprises is challenging. The key is isolating metrics into specific components and starting with subsets of teams rather than the whole organization.

For platform adopters themselves, focus on metrics they care about - things that give them their time back. Track ticket reduction, wait times, and value stream mapping that shows how long teams wait between process steps, not just execution time.

"It's often looking at that wait time and treating it as a metric for platform adopters themselves that becomes very valuable because they can see, yeah, I know this sucks. I know this takes me two weeks just to get this networking configuration back from the security team. Now it takes two minutes or even a couple hours. That's a huge change," Mallory said.

Leading indicators matter as much as lagging indicators like DORA metrics. You need ways to measure "is this going to work?" not just "did this work?" to make informed decisions about whether to continue, modify, or kill initiatives.

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Key takeaways

• Address the human side first - Resistance to platforms usually stems from fear and self-preservation, not technical concerns. Have honest conversations to understand what people are really worried about before pushing adoption.
• Translate technical work into business language - Stop talking about tools and start talking about accelerators. Frame platform value in terms of ROI, risk reduction, faster time to market, and strategic business outcomes that executives and stakeholders care about.
• Build influence across the value loop - Platform engineering is a continuous political negotiation at every phase, from pain point identification through MVP, funding, production readiness, adoption, and continuous improvement. Know who needs to be influential outside your team at each stage.‍
• Measure what gives time back - For platform adopters, focus on metrics they care about like reduced ticket wait times and value stream improvements. For leadership, tie these to business outcomes with clear ROI calculations that substantiate both investment and long-term return.