They built the "golden path".
Very few used it, but damn was it golden.
What Happened?
Platform Engineering dreamed big: reusable templates, standards built-in, shiny dashboards. The pitch looked great, but reality hit harder than a Friday deploy.
Most platforms today struggle to get past 10-30% adoption and are considered a failure.
So why are devs not adopting the platform? Two common reasons:
- Misaligned Incentives — Platform teams want everyone to follow the "golden path", but App developers need to ship quickly. They don't have time to migrate working projects to company approved templates.
- Tech Stack Diversity — Even if you say "we'll just use templates for new services" - there are still too many different technologies to support. Most teams think they'll settle for 80% of use cases, but rarely even achieve that.
Platform teams either continue hoping that their platform will become so good that everyone will just want to use it... Or they eventually resort to iron-fist ruling, asking upper management to mandate platform usage. Both are met with inevitable resistance due to the diverse nature of microservices and a priority to ship new revenue-driving features faster.
So What Now?
Engineering standards are not optional. But your platform is.
If Platform Engineering is to survive, we need to stop treating platforms as the way to enforce engineering standards. Platforms are to be treated like products, but products operate in competitive markets, and few platforms (products) achieve total monopoly.
Realign the goals of your platform with reality. If your platform set out to achieve universal engineering standards by enforcing golden paths, it will be considered a failure when it doesn't reach total adoption.
Engineering Standards. Where They Belong.
If engineering excellence is a goal, then standards should be defined outside of platform templates, in something more universal. Earthly Lunar instruments, and actually enforces your engineering requirements across every tech stack, repo, and CI/CD pipeline — even all those legacy services and outliers that fall outside of the golden path.
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