Platform engineering has become one of the fastest-growing practices in IT, and for good reason. Internal developer portals, golden paths and self-service infrastructure have helped organizations reduce developer toil and tame the chaos of sprawling toolchains. Yet, as the hype around platform engineering reaches a fever pitch, I keep hearing a familiar refrain in boardrooms and C-suites: “Show me the value.”
It’s not enough anymore to say that platforms make developers “happier” or “more productive.” Those are nice outcomes, but they’re not the metrics that CFOs or CEOs live and die by. When budgets are scrutinized, leadership doesn’t want platitudes — they want numbers. Dollars saved. Risks avoided. Time shaved off product launches. And unless platform engineering can translate its contributions into that language, it risks becoming the latest IT trend that fades as quickly as it arrived.
Why Old Metrics Don’t Cut It
We’ve been here before. For years, IT measured itself on uptime, mean time to recovery, or the number of tickets closed. DevOps shifted the narrative with DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time and change failure rate. Those were big improvements, but they’re still inward-facing. They don’t speak to the boardroom.
The truth is, executives care about outcomes that affect the business: How quickly can we bring new features to market, how much money are we spending on infrastructure, and how much risk are we carrying? Everything else is background noise.
Making the Cost Case
This is where platform engineering already has a compelling story — if we choose to tell it properly. Automation of environments and provisioning reduces wasted cloud spend. Standardized pipelines eliminate redundant tooling. Golden paths shorten time to production, which means products launch faster.
Each of those can be translated into real financial impact. Instead of talking about YAML files and Kubernetes clusters, frame it as X dollars saved per environment or Y percent reduction in SaaS licensing costs. Suddenly, platform engineering isn’t a “developer experience initiative.” It’s a cost-control mechanism.
Productivity and Time to Market
Of course, cost isn’t the only angle. Time is just as valuable a currency. When developers don’t need to wait days or weeks for infrastructure tickets, they get back hours of flow time. Multiply that across hundreds or thousands of engineers, and it adds up quickly. Faster onboarding, faster throughput, faster feedback loops — these aren’t abstract concepts. They’re measurable outcomes that drive time to market.
And time to market, in turn, drives competitive advantage. That’s the story executives want to hear.
Risk and Compliance: The Silent Value
Then there’s the less flashy but equally critical value: Risk reduction. Platforms with baked-in security and compliance policies block misconfigurations before they become incidents. Automated audit trails reduce the scramble during regulatory reviews. Every incident avoided, every hour saved in compliance prep, is money and reputation preserved.
Executives may not cheer for policy-as-code, but they absolutely understand the value of avoiding fines, breaches and brand damage. That’s where platform engineering becomes a silent insurance policy for the enterprise.
Tomorrow’s Metrics
As the discipline matures, I expect new metrics to emerge. Adoption rates: How many developers actually use the platform? Self-service success: How often developers complete tasks without manual intervention. Even alignment metrics: Drawing a direct line between features delivered and customer outcomes.
And as AI-native platforms become the norm, new measures will follow. We’ll need to quantify the percentage of tasks AI agents are handling inside pipelines, how much infrastructure cost optimization is driven by machine intelligence, and how often developers trust AI-suggested fixes. These won’t just be technical metrics — they’ll be business indicators of how well an organization is capitalizing on AI.
Shimmy’s Take
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If you can’t measure it, you can’t defend it. Platform engineering is at that critical juncture right now. If we keep the conversation locked in the world of cognitive load and developer satisfaction, we’ll lose the attention of the business. But if we start speaking in terms of dollars, risks and time to market, platform engineering won’t just survive — it will thrive.
If DevOps gave us culture and speed, platform engineering will be remembered for delivering measurable business value. And that means learning to speak the language of the boardroom.