Platform engineering is no longer a niche experiment inside IT. As software delivery grows more complex, organizations are investing heavily in platform teams to reduce friction, improve security, and give developers the tools they need to deliver features faster.
But many teams start out with what experts call “rainbow teams” — overloaded with every task under the sun and stretched thin across operations, cloud provisioning and firefighting.
Platform engineering maturity is achieved when the platform becomes invisible to developers and accelerates delivery instead of slowing it down.
“Platform engineering maturity shows up when the platform feels invisible to developers, it just works,” says Derek Ashmore, AI enablement principal at Asperitas.
Teams no longer spend cycles reinventing pipelines, hand-crafting infrastructure, or chasing down environment mismatches.
“Instead, they build features quickly and with confidence because the platform provides self-service, standardized paths that meet security and compliance needs without extra negotiation,” he explains.
Henrique Back, head of engineering at Indicium, agrees that maturity is about becoming a multiplier rather than a bottleneck.
“Maturity is when the platform team stops being a bottleneck and starts being a multiplier,” he says. “In practice, this means developers are autonomous, pipelines are reliable, metrics clearly show business value, and there is mutual trust.”
He adds organizations know when they have reached maturity when teams actively ask for more platform capabilities because they trust it, not because they are forced to use it.”
From “Rainbow Teams” to Product Thinking
The first step toward maturity is narrowing focus. Many platform teams start out with responsibility for everything—provisioning, incident response, and ad hoc requests from developers.
“The path to maturity is narrowing the aperture, deciding which problems truly belong to the platform and which are better handled elsewhere,” Ashmore says.
That means explicitly defining the platform’s scope, aligning it to high-value outcomes like faster developer onboarding, secure delivery pipelines, or standardized infrastructure patterns.
Back says teams must stop saying yes to everything and define a clear roadmap.
“That requires product management discipline and leadership that protects the team from being overloaded,” he says. “Success is not about the number of features, it is about impact.”
Adopting a product mindset is key. Mature platform teams build reusable capabilities and document them clearly rather than operating as a catch-all operations group.
“Instead of chasing every request, platform engineers prioritize based on user impact and business value,” Ashmore says.
They establish roadmaps, service tiers, and intake processes that make it clear what the platform owns, and what it doesn’t
“This allows the team to stop acting as a catch-all ops group and start building reusable capabilities that scale across the organization,” he says.
The Power of Self-Service
Self-service is another hallmark of platform maturity, which, along with clear interfaces, is the linchpin of platform adoption.
When developers can provision environments, deploy services, or access observability tools without filing tickets, the platform stops being a bottleneck and starts being an accelerator.
Back says intuitive design is critical to make self-service work.
“If developers need to open tickets for every small task, the platform will never scale,” he says.
Self-service with intuitive interfaces gives autonomy and removes the perception of the platform as a bottleneck.
“The best platform is the one that fades into the workflow and just works without friction,” he says.
Well-documented APIs, CLIs and portals also help teams avoid costly misconfigurations.
“Clear, well-documented interfaces reduce cognitive load, prevent misconfigurations, and make the platform predictable,” Ashmore says.
He adds that when engineers know that using the platform is faster and less error-prone than building their own path, adoption follows naturally.
Measuring What Matters
Many organizations still rely on basic operational metrics such as uptime or the number of tickets closed, but experts argue these are not enough.
“Traditional metrics like uptime or ticket volume only capture whether the platform is ‘working,’” Ashmore says. “Maturity is better measured by how the platform accelerates delivery and improves the developer experience.”
That means measuring things like onboarding time, deployment frequency and adoption of standardized workflows.
“Look at product-like metrics such as onboarding time, workflow adoption, developer satisfaction and deployment frequency,” Back says.
From his perspective, the key question is whether developers are faster, more confident and happier with how they work.
Another key signal is whether developers voluntarily choose to use the platform: High voluntary adoption indicates the platform has become the preferred way to ship software.
“If teams are bypassing the platform or building shadow pipelines, it’s a sign the platform isn’t meeting their needs,” Ashmore warns.
Moving Beyond Firefighting
Perhaps the biggest shift on the journey to maturity is moving from firefighting to building systems that are resilient by design.
“The key to moving beyond firefighting is shifting from reactive support to proactive design,” Ashmore says.
That starts with treating the platform as a product: Having a clear backlog, prioritization process and roadmap aligned to developer needs.
Back stresses that automation is essential to break the cycle of repetitive incidents.
“The first thing I always tell teams is to get rid of the repetitive pain points by automating them,” Back says. “If you are fighting the same fire every week, you are wasting energy that could be spent building.”
Visibility and feedback loops help teams catch issues before they disrupt delivery. Once that noise is under control, the next step is to invest in better visibility and faster feedback, so organizations know what is happening in their systems before things blow up.
Finally, shift the mindset of the team itself: Back says it’s important to stop thinking of the platform group as a support desk and start treating it like a product team.
“That change frees people up to move from constant firefighting into building systems that are resilient and can really scale,” Back says.
Ultimately, the goal of platform engineering maturity is simple: Give developers confidence and autonomy so they can focus on innovation.
“You don’t measure maturity by the number of tools deployed, but by how well those tools have been abstracted into a cohesive product that drives developer productivity and organizational outcomes,” Ashmore says.