There is a failure mode so common in platform engineering that it barely gets mentioned anymore. A team ships a self-service workflow — environment provisioning, policy enforcement, automated approvals — and the thing works. Technically, it does exactly what it was scoped to do.
Then, six weeks later, half the engineering org is still on old scripts, Slack is full of exception requests, and the platform team is in an uncomfortable position: either mandate adoption or watch their work quietly routed around.
The engineering wasn’t the…
