Ben Linders

A platform is a collaboration system: platform teams depend on application teams, and both need shared standards. Engineers trust a platform through its predictable behavior, not its features. Being an engineer is about problem-solving and being passionate about it. And being an engineer means sharing your passion for problem-solving.

A lot of platform teams face a problem: they build a lot of really cool stuff, and then their developers don't use it. Be visible to management, talk to stakeholders and listen to their problems, make your value measurable with metrics like DORA, create narratives, and show the hidden pain to make it personal: these are lessons that Lucas Hornung and Christian Matthaei presented.

When a new platform team set out on implementing their roadmap through forced workflows with poor documentation, developer experience declined. Success came from simplifying governance, prioritizing what matters, and rolling out compliance incrementally through prevention, detection, and communication. Empathy, focus, and shared purpose drove successful adoption.

AI is an amplifier; strategic focus on the organizational system brings the greatest returns. DORA's 2025 research on AI in software development provides team profiles and success capabilities that can be used to put the research into practice.

Having a platform is not enough; the real challenge is ensuring that it is understandable, usable, and actually adopted by its users. A capability is done when it can be reliably used by others. To evaluate progress, you can ask yourself “Is this being used?” and “Does it reduce friction for users?” This can help align development work with actual user value rather than delivery,

AI is disrupting career progression by eliminating the learning opportunities at each rung while simultaneously enabling people to perform above their experience level, Alasdair Allan explained in his talk Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle at QCon London. Fewer junior developers join the industry, and AI slows hiring at the entry level.

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes all code write-only,. It’s too dense to read, and tests define the behaviour and become the documentation. Code is also disposable; it becomes easier to rewrite than to debug. Humans can't review AI-generated code at scale. Intent decouples from implementation; developers should focus on creativity.

By using a sustainable testing strategy, you can skip unnecessary tests, ensure failing fast and early, and only run tests affected by code changes. Tracking energy use per test and using static code analysis can help spot inefficiencies and guide optimization efforts.

Mandatory AI checks paired with manual spikes for complex changes keep developers sharp. Teams can boost velocity by skipping peer reviews on low-risk PRs and using AI approvals, provided most developers are code owners and teams are small.

Autonomous teams are an article of faith in modern software development. The shape of our value determines what we can do; it determines our trade-offs between agency and coherence. We all have a purpose, and we all have agency to do something, hence the suggestion is moving from product focus to value center thinking.