We killed the ops silo. Then we gave it a golden path and a nicer logo. The platform team was meant to solve our problems. Somehow it became the same disease with a Backstage portal on top. ## The pitch we all bought
Team Topologies sold platform teams as a way to reduce cognitive load. According to Gartner, 80% of large engineering organizations will have platform teams by 2026. This is an increase from 45% in 2022. But here's the tension nobody wants to name. "You build it, you run it" and "let the platform team handle it" are pulling in opposite directions. You can't advocate ownership and then have all deploys funnel through a dedicated team of specialists. Gotta choose one. ## The bottleneck came back wearing a hoodie
We disliked the ops team because of the never-ending ticket queue. If you needed a database, you had to submit a request and then wait for someone from another department to approve and create it for you. Platform engineering was supposed to bring self-service. But the State of Platform Engineering Report (Volume 4) reports that 45.3% of platform teams highlight developer adoption as the biggest challenge. Why? Well, 36.6% depend on top-down mandates to coerce developers to use their platform and not because they actually want to. 😬
