Many engineering teams build internal developer platforms that nobody adopts. In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack why — and what one team did differently. They walk through a real case: a mid-size SaaS company whose API platform team spent eight months building a developer portal with every feature the team could imagine, only to find that six months after launch, fewer than 20 percent of services were using it. The hosts trace the root cause: the platform team built for their own ideal developer, not the actual developer — cargo-culting patterns from big tech without understanding their own engineers' pain points. Lucas explains the specific missteps: too many abstractions, a mandatory migration deadline that scared teams, and a lack of dogfooding. Luna pushes back on whether those mistakes are avoidable when you're a small team. The conversation drills into the one metric that matters for platform adoption — time to first deploy — and how one CTO cut it from four days to two hours by letting teams opt in gradually. No hot takes, just a concrete playbook for anyone building a platform their colleagues won't ignore.

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