Overcoming political hurdles for platform engineering success

This is the third article in our Platform engineering survival: Solving the core challenges series.

Platform engineering promises to boost developer productivity, accelerate time-to-market and reduce operational friction through the creation of internal, self-service developer platforms.

Yet, as Punit Lad, a lead platform engineering consultant, articulates, the journey to true platform success is less about technical brilliance and more about navigating the complex, often treacherous waters of organizational politics.

His core insight is stark: "Its success only goes as far as the organizational politics want it to go." Platform engineering efforts frequently stall, not because of flawed technology, but because they fail to achieve the necessary enterprise-wide alignment and business recognition.
 

Organizational friction: From innovation to isolation

The first and most common political hurdle is the silo effect. Platform initiatives often start small, within a single, enthusiastic corner of the organization. A technical leader, inspired by a conference or book, champions a cutting-edge, self-service platform to replace outdated and legacy systems. 
 

The intention is sound: build the "ninth thing” that's going to replace the other eight. This new platform promises to be different and to reduce complexity throughout the organization, yet the reality is often more additive than revolutionary. Without broad organizational alignment, adding new infrastructure only fragments the ecosystem further, with a cluttered developer experience and lack of integration. No matter how brilliant the platform is, if potential users are stuck on legacy systems due to missing migration capacities, its reach and impact remains confined to a small fraction of the enterprise.

This isolation is a direct result of failing to secure buy-in from all the necessary stakeholders across different business lines. When you start with a "thin slice" or a "thin viable platform (TVP), as recommended by methodologies like Team Topologies, the initial success must be rapidly leveraged to drive broader adoption. If the surrounding organizational structure — the very political landscape — pushes back, the platform remains a just an island of efficiency, unable to deliver on the promised economies of scale.
 

Simultaneously, organizations struggle with existing, costly legacy platforms that are not budgeted for change. These platforms will continue to evolve until market forces or internal friction make consolidation inevitable, often at a significantly higher cost due to the accrued technical debt and deeper entanglement across the business.

The cost center conundrum: Fighting for business value
 

Perhaps the most challenging political battle is the perception of the IT space, usually where a platform engineering team would reside. They are typically responsible for underlying infrastructure rather than anything business facing, so are often viewed as a cost center that supporting the business (OpEx) rather than driving it (CapEx).
 

This perception is a political and financial handicap. When financial leaders review IT spend, the platform investment is just a line item, a cost, unless it is explicitly tied back to tangible business value. 
 

When implementing a platform engineering initiative, getting the required political support requires a fundamental shift in how the organization views work within IT. As long as IT is seen strictly as an operational expense or cost center — a bill to be paid rather than a driver of growth — its influence will always be limited. To be treated as equals, it’s essential to demonstrate that this budget isn't just keeping the lights on, but is actually multiplying value for the business.
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This requires a shift in language. While platform engineering teams care deeply about technical metrics like deployment frequency or lead time, business leaders are more focused on stock prices, market share, investor confidence and building better products. If IT and the platform wants to be taken seriously, beyond being a cost center, platform engineering teams must bridge that gap and show exactly how the platform helps the company build better products faster.
 

Consider a DORA metric like lead time to change. While engineers recognize this as a critical metric in software delivery and efficiency, the raw technical data often fails to resonate across organization leaders. It inadvertently reinforces the perception of IT as a siloed cost center. This can be addressed by aligning it to business value. For example, reframing lead time to change as “time to market” or “customer responsiveness” moves the conversation beyond operational mechanics to how a platform can help the business rapidly respond to changing customers needs or requirements.

This shift demonstrates that the platform is not merely 'keeping the lights on,' but actively fueling customer adoption and securing a competitive advantage.
 

True political victory is achieved when the platform team can fluidly translate technical benefits (such as improved DORA metrics) into financial and competitive outcomes: By speaking a language of business value (money, savings or competitive advantage), an IT organization, through platform engineering, transforms from a cost center into an indispensable value driver.

The stakeholder trap: Tying success to a single champion
 

Organizational politics often dictate the ceiling of an internal platform’s success. While platform initiatives are frequently sparked by an influential or visionary technical leader who understands the value of DORA metrics, self-service and product thinking, the existing political landscape and boundaries of an organization can create significant friction when trying to scale adoption beyond that leader’s immediate sphere of influence.
 

This dynamic creates a fragile momentum, where an initiative becomes too tightly coupled to a visionary or influential technical leader. At Thoughtworks, we’ve seen a recurring pattern where internal platforms gain traction within one specific domain and/or business line due to the sheer force of a champion, yet fail to build necessary alliances across the wider organization. When that leadership inevitably transitions — whether through retirement or restructuring — the lack of institutional alignment is exposed. And without a broad base of political support, the initiative often creates a vacuum that is quickly filled by old habits. The organization slowly reverts to a traditional "throw-it-over-the-fence" operational model,  undoing the self-service culture and slowing the organization back down.

The path to political victory: Product thinking and long-term commitment

Overcoming these political challenges requires a deliberate and sustained strategy:

1. Embrace product thinking

Platform engineering must adopt a product mindset. The internal developers are the platform's customers. By engaging with these developers — conducting interviews, soliciting feedback — the platform team can uncover and solve their most painful problems, such as a lengthy change advisory board process or a nine-month provisioning time for a dev environment.
 

Through this, deeper development and business pains and friction points can be solved. Product thinking moves the organization from a nine-month provisioning time to ten minutes. It provides tangible, irrefutable evidence of the platform's value. The team is no longer just building cool tech; it is solving real, felt problems for its customers and, by extension, creating business velocity.
 

2. Marketing and momentum
 

The platform team needs to become an internal marketing agency. After the initial thin slice proves its worth, the team must organize roadshows and leverage their early adopters as advocates to market the platform across the organization. The goal is to build unstoppable momentum — an exponential growth in adoption where business leaders feel compelled to get on board.
 

3. Acknowledging the long journey
 

Finally, organizations must recognize that digital transformation driven by platform engineering is a long journey, not a short term project. It requires patience and a strategy for gradually bringing teams onto the platform. Migration pathways for every type of team and architecture need to be considered — legacy and mainframes included.

It’s not just about building the tech which is "easy," but about changing ingrained political structures, working patterns and mindsets, which is "really hard." Rushing the process, or expecting rapid, enterprise-wide adoption, often overloads the platform team and forces them to revert to old, unsustainable support models, effectively ending the transformation prematurely.
 

Winning hearts before writing code

In conclusion, the destiny of a platform engineering initiative is often sealed in the boardrooms and across the departmental silos, long before the first line of code is written. To truly succeed, platform leaders must master the art of organizational politics, translating technical achievement into business language and building a coalition of allies that can sustain the platform's growth far beyond the tenure of any single champion.

In the next article, we explore how to escape the labyrinth of technical complexity and cognitive burden