Putting the developer at the centre of platform engineering
I came across an article on the Stack Overflow blog, “Building better platforms with continuous discovery”, which offers a tangible and practical perspective on platform engineering. It argues for adopting a product management practice—continuous discovery—to ensure platform teams build tools that developers, their customers, actually need and use.
The core idea is to treat internal engineers as customers and to understand their workflows and pain points before building solutions. This prevents teams from creating tools that, while technically sound, do not get adopted because they solve the wrong problem. As the article states:
When discovery is missing, platform work starts to drift from its real purpose, which is empowering engineers to deploy working software faster and with confidence.
While the article provides a strong framework, it is a bit light on the specific methods used to gather this continuous feedback from engineers. However, the central principle of placing the developer at the heart of the process is a valuable one, especially in larger corporate environments where platform teams can become disconnected from the developers they serve.
This approach is a practical next step to the ideas I explored in my post on “From platform engineering to platform democracy”. Where platform democracy describes the ‘what’—a more collaborative and flexible platform model—continuous discovery provides the ‘how’. It is the mechanism through which developers can contribute to and shape the platform, ensuring it meets their evolving needs.
It also connects well with the mindset of moving quickly, which I discussed in “The cost of being wrong”. By maintaining a tight feedback loop with developers, platform teams can iterate with more confidence. They can test assumptions early and often, reducing the risk of building the wrong thing for months on end. This aligns perfectly with the article’s conclusion:
Shipping fast is great. Shipping right is better. Discovery helps us do both.
Ultimately, continuous discovery is a useful framework for ensuring platform engineering delivers on its primary promise: helping developers ship valuable software more effectively.
