Modern software teams are expected to move fast, but many organizations slow themselves down with fragmented tools, inconsistent processes, and teams repeatedly rebuilding the same core capabilities.
Platform engineering solves this by providing shared, internal platforms designed specifically for developers.
By standardizing fundamentals like deployment, security and alerting, platforms reduce friction and complexity, letting teams focus on delivering real business value.
Babu Srithar M, senior director, engineering at Cockroach Labs, says he most often sees velocity fail where operational friction lives: Fragmented diagnostics and observability, duplicated effort, and slow, noisy feedback loops.
“Practices that work for a few teams quickly scale poorly as groups drift into their own non-standard approaches to CI/CD, testing, observability and monetization, so knowledge and tooling stop transferring,” he explains.
At the same time, operational toil, such as hand-running tests, triaging escalations, and wiring one-off changes, steadily crowds out roadmap work.
“These repetitive, bespoke tasks are the biggest killers of velocity, and AI amplifies the problem by making it easy to produce ad-hoc code and agents,” he says.
Dmitry Chuyko, performance architect at BellSoft, adds that the breakdown in velocity isn’t always obvious.
“Individual project velocity might look fine,” he says. “The problem shows up as a hidden duplication cost.”
Teams independently rebuild the same deployment pipelines, monitoring setups, and security tooling. Each solves it slightly differently.
“Then the multiplier effect hits,” he says. “You’re maintaining five different alerting systems, three CI/CD patterns, and legacy projects nobody has expertise to support anymore.”
In short, velocity doesn’t drop suddenly; it erodes as complexity accumulates and tribal knowledge becomes organizational bottlenecks.
Platform engineering pays this back by removing friction, shortening feedback loops, standardizing commonly performed work, and freeing product teams to focus on their core mission.
Chuyko advocates for the prioritization of daily-use capabilities: Release automation (developers use it constantly), observability (production operations every day), and security/secrets management (incident prevention).
“These deliver ROI because they’re high-frequency, high-impact activities,” he explains.
When deployment takes 10 minutes instead of two hours, and that happens dozens of times daily across all teams, the savings compound fast.
“When security scanning is automatic rather than a manual gate, you prevent incidents before they cost you,” he cautions. “Skip the exotic capabilities until the fundamentals are solid.”
Standardizing Capabilities
M explains that at a high level, the highest ROI comes from standardizing capabilities that shorten feedback loops and eliminate repeated toil.
Companies can invest in this pattern across a few concrete areas that illustrate the point: Build/test and environment automation, with a paved path for CI/CD, artifact publishing and scale testing to cut PR cycle time and de-risk large changes.
He advises building a common observability layer of consistent metrics, logs, traces, dashboards and alerting so teams debug once and reuse insights.
Finally, monetization and entitlement tooling that centralizes usage metering, billing, pricing and license management so product teams can experiment safely.
“These are examples of where organizations see fast payoff and can complement them with mini platform teams embedded inside product components that apply the same approach locally to accelerate delivery while keeping domain expertise close to the work,” he says.
Reducing Friction, Accelerating Delivery
Pasha Finkelshteyn, developer advocate at BellSoft, says the first signal that tells leadership that ad hoc DevOps practices are no longer sufficient at scale is repetitive team friction.
“When Slack channels fill with the same questions, and every team has a different answer, you need standardization,” he says.
The second shows up in operational metrics: Declining availability, increasing error rates, and budgets and timelines consistently overrunning.
“These indicate complexity is outpacing your ability to manage it manually,” he says.
Finkelshteyn says the final signal is organizational: Adding a new team takes weeks of setup and knowledge transfer instead of hours.
“When onboarding friction becomes this expensive, ad hoc practices have hit their ceiling,” he explains.
For organizations to measure whether a platform is accelerating delivery, not just centralizing control, Finkelshteyn suggests watching for business outcomes: Shorter time-to-market for features, faster onboarding for new teams, and reduced incidents
“If your platform increases governance overhead without improving these metrics, you’ve built a gatekeeper, not an accelerator,” he says.
However, from his perspective, the clearest indicator is behavioral.
“When teams choose to adopt the platform voluntarily rather than through mandated policy, you know it’s delivering value,” he says.
When those repetitive “How do I…?” conversations disappear from Slack, that’s when the platform has truly provided the clear answers developers need.