Driving and Measuring the Impact of Platform Engineering

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Driving and Measuring the Impact of Platform Engineering

Apr 30, 2026 3 min read

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Platform engineering has to be approached from a socio-technical perspective, and shaped by all stakeholders, not just developers, Sergiu Petean said in his talk Driving the Future of Insurance through Platform Engineering at Dev Summit Munich. Platform success depends on written principles that endure change while embracing change as the main design force, to enable teams to build, run, and release software.

Everybody consumes some kind of platform behind the business and the system of work, because that’s where efficiency comes from, Petean said. In the financial world, there is a clear set of KPIs for measuring the success of every initiative or project. Unfortunately, that is not true for platform engineering, he argued:

Just ask any leader behind a technical platform how successful his platform is and how it compares with his peers. You’ll be amazed.

The purpose, role, and impact of platforms have to be much better understood by the industry, Petean said. In some cases, platform success and impact might be measured from a single stakeholder point of view using some standard KPIs. Think of the internal development portal (IDP) and its KPIs for engineering teams, such as onboarding time, deployment frequency, lead time, and mean time to recovery.

Very rarely, though, we’ll have a deep understanding of the holistic impact on all stakeholders, Petean mentioned:

The financial and strategic capabilities and impact, where the future of innovation is actually written, are rarely measured.

Petean defined platform engineering as "_a socio-technical set of practices that prioritises experience over tool-selection freedom to better serve the whole organisation_". What kind of technology you use is shaped by the forces and the stakeholders that you have to deal with:

In my case, the strongest stakeholders were not the developers. We had way bigger forces, like security, compliance, the CEO’s office, and the Chief Transformation Office. All of them became strong and continuous design partners.

A platform team is driven by its vision, talent, mission, stakeholders, and principles, Petean said. The first four are starting to be addressed more often. This is great, but where the community needs to be louder is on the last one, the principles, he explained:

For principles to resist time and change, they have to be well-balanced and ideally holistically expressed. The already existing organisational and cultural principles need to be in harmony with the team’s and personal principles.

Petean mentioned that it’s important to write down the principles and the mission for the platform, because they will be building and conserving the team culture and identity:

We defined our internal and external identity and continuously adapted our internal and external topology to better serve our product stakeholders. We embraced change, everywhere, with one exception: Principles.

As a value-stream team, they have built a future-proof platform to enable teams to write, deploy, monitor, and maintain their own production environments, Petean said. They changed the whole software release process and democratised it. Their DevOps motto was: "You build it. You run it, but never alone," he concluded.

InfoQ interviewed Sergiu Petean about driving change and the impact of platform teams.

**InfoQ: What is your approach to driving change in the organisation?**

**Sergiu Petean**: The first condition for change to happen is ownership. A team needs to fully own the knowledge behind the change object.

When change applies to something extremely complicated, such as a global platform (and its operating model), the internal talent and holistic perspective are critical. The executive team’s vision and support become critical as well. They need to invest in both culture (which does not come for free) and safety (any major change comes with a potential major risk).

**InfoQ: How did you measure your impact as a platform team, and what did you learn from this?**

**Petean:** One of the key principles we all agreed on on day one was measurability. We decided to measure everything we were building. Our impact KPIs became more and more important as we started serving more stakeholders and having a bigger impact. Later, when the European IT Cost Center "curse" found us, our impact KPIs became our best allies.

Let’s use an example to explain this. Imagine your CFO demanding savings. Your platform team is too big. You need to reduce it. On the other side, your COO is not kidding about the 100% compliance readiness. Your platform team is heavily invested in compliance. Any FTE reduction will lead to a significant impact on compliance. Your COO will become your best supporter in keeping your team intact as long as there is a clear correlation between compliance and the Platform team.

About the Author


#### **Ben Linders**

**Ben Linders**runs a one-person business in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. Author ofGetting Value out of Agile Retrospectives,Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives,What Drives Quality, The Agile Self-assessment Game, Problem? What Problem?, and Continuous Improvement. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game. As an adviser, coach, and trainer, he helps organizations by deploying effective software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development. Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean and Quality, and a frequent speaker and writer. He shares his experience in a bilingual blog(Dutch and English) and as aneditor for Agile at InfoQ. Follow him on twitter:@BenLinders.

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