Introduction
Over my experience of building and scaling platforms for several teams, I have learned a valuable lesson: Platform engineering can only work if it serves developers, not just architecture charts. It is easy to get carried away with the ambition of solving every possible future use case. But if your platform can not solve the problems you face today, it will not be adopted at all for the future.
Obviously, I have also made some of these mistakes myself. I have also seen them repeated at companies undergoing enterprise modernization. And in every such case, the consequences were clear: wasted time, frustrated developers, and delayed product delivery.
Based on my experience and to help my audience, I have summed up the major platform engineering mistakes you need to know and shared how to avoid them.
Top 5 Platform Engineering Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Here's a detailed breakdown of the key platform engineering mistakes that most companies and their teams make, and how can you avoid them:
1. Building Before Understanding Developer Pain
Many times, platform teams jump straight into building tools and automation workflows without even understanding the pain points of the platform's actual users. They just assume that they know what the developers might be facing, and they start coding. The result? Features that nobody uses, workflows that are not at all aligned with how the teams actually work, and internal tools that cause more chaos than help.
How to Avoid It?
Talk it out with the developers. Get an idea of their day-to-day experience. Understand their problems. Map out the pain points across environments, CI pipelines, deployments, and permissions. Based on this, create an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) focused only on these issues, solve them well, and make the necessary broader upgrades.
2. Trying to Be Perfect
Teams often make this mistake: They try to build the “perfect” platform that covers everything from CI to secrets management to cost controls in one go. They want a unified solution, but the result is usually a cluttered system that will take many months to stabilize and will still not properly satisfy a single use case. And by the time it’s ready, the team’s priorities have already changed.
How to Avoid It?
Start small. Focus on a niche problem that affects most developers. Maybe it’s a deployment bottleneck, or inconsistent staging environments. Develop a basic solution, test it, and grow from there. Successful platform engineering is iterative. It earns trust over time, not all at once.
3. Treating the Platform as a Side Project
Many of the platforms being built today are actually side projects, which were worked on in spare time or during off-cycles between sprints. They are not prioritized like production-facing work. That means they result from no clear roadmap, no proper ownership, and very little user feedback. Eventually, they become a mess of half-working tools developers want to avoid, serving no purpose and just a hole in the pocket.
How to Avoid It?
Treat your platform like a product. Assign a dedicated team. Define clear objectives. Prioritize it in sprint planning. Set up feedback loops. If you want your engineers to use the platform, then your platform team must operate with the same discipline as any other product team. That includes roadmaps, metrics, and regular releases.
4. Focusing Only on Building Tools, Not Experience
Many platform teams spend most of their time and effort setting up tools and forget about the people using them. The result is a messy system where developers have to jump between multiple dashboards just to get the basic things done, like checking logs or deploying code. Sometimes, they even have to raise internal tickets for simple tasks, which slows everything down.
How to Avoid It?
Build the platform with the developer in mind. Make it easy to use, not just technically complete. Aim to get a new developer up and running quickly. Offer self-service options, easy-to-use interfaces, and clear, simple documentation. Avoid adding unnecessary layers that confuse people. You are making a platform to make people’s lives easier, so do not complicate it.
5. Not Measuring Platform Impact
Sometimes teams build a platform, roll it out, and assume it’s working just because people have access to it. But they don’t check if it’s actually helping. Is it saving developers time? Are releases faster? Are there fewer issues? If no one tracks this, it’s hard to know if the platform is worth the effort or cost.
How to Avoid It?
Set up clear success metrics from day one, track things like how often teams deploy, how fast they fix problems, how long it takes to make changes, and how many support tickets come in. Ask developers for feedback regularly. If you know what’s working and what’s not, you can improve the platform and make it worth the effort.
Final Thoughts
Platform engineering is hard. You’re not just building tools. You’re shaping the foundation on which all software gets delivered. That requires more than good technical choices. It requires the mindset of a product owner, the curiosity of a user researcher, and the discipline of a systems engineer.
I have also made mistakes, and I’ve learned from them. I’ve built things too early, ignored developer feedback, and assumed usage without measuring it, and the result has always been clear: poor adoption and slow delivery.
If you're facing similar issues, focus on the fundamentals. Build only what’s needed, involve your developers from the start, and track actual results. And if you want to avoid these platform engineering mistakes, work with a platform engineering service provider that has solved them before. It can save time, reduce risk, and help you build something your teams actually use.