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10 Platform Engineering Anti-Patterns That Kill Developer Productivity
DORA 2024 found organizations with platform teams saw throughput decrease by 8% and stability decrease by 14%. Wait—isn't platform engineering supposed to help?
In this episode, Jordan and Alex unpack the 10 anti-patterns sabotaging platform engineering initiatives:
ORGANIZATIONAL ANTI-PATTERNS:
1. Ticket Ops - The bottleneck factory where developers wait a week for tasks that should take minutes
2. Ivory Tower Platform - Teams disconnected from developer reality creating standards no one follows
3. Platform as Bucket - When platform scope grows 3x without corresponding team growth
4. Mandatory Adoption - Forcing usage hides resistance and breeds resentment
TECHNICAL ANTI-PATTERNS:
5. Golden Cage - Excessive standardization that blocks productivity
6. Over-Engineered Monolith - Platforms so complex that learning them becomes a project
7. Front-End First - Beautiful portals with manual processes underneath (35% still use spreadsheets!)
8. Biggest Bang Trap - Starting with the hardest problem to maximize ROI
STRATEGIC ANTI-PATTERNS:
9. Day 1 Obsession - Optimizing for <1% of the application lifecycle
10. Build It And They Will Come - No adoption strategy at all
KEY INSIGHTS:
• Spotify's Backstage users are 2.3x more active on GitHub
• Zalando's first step was cultural, not technical
• Teams with stable priorities face 40% less burnout
• Firms with adoption strategies see 30% higher ROI
AUDIT YOUR PLATFORM:
Are developers waiting more than 1 day for requests? → Ticket Ops
Has your platform team pair-programmed with devs this quarter? → Ivory Tower risk
Scope grown 3x without team growth? → Platform as Bucket
One-size-fits-all templates with no extension points? → Golden Cage
Beautiful portal but Slack for help? → Front-End First
If you answer yes to 3+ of these, your platform initiative is at serious risk.
Read the full blog post: https://platformengineering.org/blog/2025/11/28/platform-engineering-anti-patterns
Sources: DORA 2024, Atlassian DX Report 2024, Port.io 2024, Team Topologies, Spotify Engineering, Zalando Engineering
#PlatformEngineering #DevOps #DORA #DeveloperExperience #InternalDeveloperPlatform #Backstage
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By vibesreDORA 2024 found organizations with platform teams saw throughput decrease by 8% and stability decrease by 14%. Wait—isn't platform engineering supposed to help?
In this episode, Jordan and Alex unpack the 10 anti-patterns sabotaging platform engineering initiatives:
ORGANIZATIONAL ANTI-PATTERNS:
1. Ticket Ops - The bottleneck factory where developers wait a week for tasks that should take minutes
2. Ivory Tower Platform - Teams disconnected from developer reality creating standards no one follows
3. Platform as Bucket - When platform scope grows 3x without corresponding team growth
4. Mandatory Adoption - Forcing usage hides resistance and breeds resentment
TECHNICAL ANTI-PATTERNS:
5. Golden Cage - Excessive standardization that blocks productivity
6. Over-Engineered Monolith - Platforms so complex that learning them becomes a project
7. Front-End First - Beautiful portals with manual processes underneath (35% still use spreadsheets!)
8. Biggest Bang Trap - Starting with the hardest problem to maximize ROI
STRATEGIC ANTI-PATTERNS:
9. Day 1 Obsession - Optimizing for <1% of the application lifecycle
10. Build It And They Will Come - No adoption strategy at all
KEY INSIGHTS:
• Spotify's Backstage users are 2.3x more active on GitHub
• Zalando's first step was cultural, not technical
• Teams with stable priorities face 40% less burnout
• Firms with adoption strategies see 30% higher ROI
AUDIT YOUR PLATFORM:
Are developers waiting more than 1 day for requests? → Ticket Ops
Has your platform team pair-programmed with devs this quarter? → Ivory Tower risk
Scope grown 3x without team growth? → Platform as Bucket
One-size-fits-all templates with no extension points? → Golden Cage
Beautiful portal but Slack for help? → Front-End First
If you answer yes to 3+ of these, your platform initiative is at serious risk.
Read the full blog post: https://platformengineering.org/blog/2025/11/28/platform-engineering-anti-patterns
Sources: DORA 2024, Atlassian DX Report 2024, Port.io 2024, Team Topologies, Spotify Engineering, Zalando Engineering
#PlatformEngineering #DevOps #DORA #DeveloperExperience #InternalDeveloperPlatform #Backstage