Platform engineering is becoming an increasingly popular approach to software delivery because it offers benefits such as improved time-to-market speed, increased developer happiness, and breaking down of team silos. We wrote extensively about platform engineering, specifically that it’s not, in fact, new and DevOps is not dead. However, given how many enterprises have struggled with delivering DevOps business value, they might view building internal digital platforms to aid software delivery as an actionable plan to achieve everything DevOps ever promised.
But how do you avoid falling into the same trap that held 80% of companies back from adopting DevOps?
Our advice: treat your platform like an internal product, and your wider teams as your customers. This means that your success metrics should be the same as you would use for your customers – with a platform engineering twist.
Key goals of Platform Engineering
When setting up your success metrics, it’s important to not lose sight of what your Platform Engineering strategy should aim for. According to the 2023 State of DevOps report, these were the top goals companies set for their platform teams.
Educating and empowering developer and product teams is a major priority for platform teams, followed by iteration speed and security processes. This people-centric approach is the same one you should adopt in your metrics. Reinventing tools is only half the job – you need to make sure your people are comfortable using the new frameworks. Streamlining and automating processes according to DevX best practices helps the entire organization move more quickly and drive a competitive edge.
Platform Engineering KPIs
According to the 2023 State of DevOps report, after adopting Platform Engineering, the majority of enterprises saw improvements in system reliability (60%), productivity and efficiency (59%), and workflow standards (57%), while 42% reported improved development time.
Productivity
Measuring lines of code produced by developers in X amount of time is an outdated metric used these days perhaps only by the likes of Elon Musk. Developer productivity is a sensitive subject, and while platform engineering promises to speed up software development, it doesn’t happen by making developers deliver more.
Instead, it’s about creating the best conditions for your devs to thrive in. Think about the bottlenecks and obstacles that your teams have to deal with daily and how much they have to rely on experts to get their work done. Complex infrastructure deployments, creating new environments, shipping features – all these require DevOps help, which inevitably clogs up processes. KPIs centered around streamlining and simplifying the software delivery process should be your focus.
This is a measurement that tracks the time from when a user story is initiated to when it’s ready for delivery. This time can also include discussions about the user story, how long it was waiting in the backlog, and how much time it took the story to move from pickup to release.
If your lead time for changes is too high, it’s a clear sign of a roadblock somewhere in your processes, causing items in the backlog not to move along. Automating whatever could be automated will help keep your lead time low, as it shows your teams are quick to adapt to feedback and deliver on their goals.
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