The hype for platform engineering is on. And while building an internal platform is a great technical endeavor, driving adoption to ensure these platforms see the light of day 2 operations comes with cultural and communicative challenges. The journey has a lot in common with building a tech company. In this talk we’ll draw these parallels, share our experiences of building a platform product as well as our learnings from driving platform adoption for dozens of internal cloud foundation platforms.

As a tech founder, I think about product market fit and scaling product adoption everyday. I’ve also experienced what it means to cross the chasm: Having innovators and early adopters use your product is one thing. Getting the main stream market to adopt your product at scale, is a whole different story.

With meshcloud, we’ve successfully supported some of the largest German companies to build internal platforms that enable their organizations to leverage the cloud at scale.

During this journey, we’ve learned about the many parallels between building a tech product business and building an internal platform. In this talk, I’ll share our own experiences on driving adoption, to make sure your internal platform initiative is not a short-term experiment but results in an integral and sustainable part of your organization’s IT strategy. Knowing your “customers”, choosing the right layer of abstraction and defining a good split of responsibilities are some of the aspects, we’ll look into.