Hi, I'm doing some basic math behind the value of investment in platform engineering. The quantitative aspects related to building and operating a platform can be fairly easy explained. However, when it comes to qualitative aspects such as: • Developer productivity vs costs of resource or time waste • Lead time to production vs opportunity cost of delayed or limited delivery • Employee satisfaction vs costs of employee turnover / costs of hiring new talent • Operational efficiency vs running company-wide optimisation programmes It's becoming more nuanced. I'm wondering if there are some companies / folks willing to share their ballpark estimations based on an actual environment in these areas above?

Hi Bartek! @Marco Pierobon and myself will be giving a talk covering these topics at PlatformCon next week, “Platform ROI calculator”: https://platformcon.com/talks/the-platform-roi-calculator-input-formula-and-results Spoiler, we consider 2 metrics for this calculator: Accelerated delivery and increased uptime (and their monetisation). As we consider speed of delivery and increased resilience as the 2 key platform value proposition. Registration to PlatformCon is free and there are literally hundreds of interesting talks!!!

I would also say that the value of the investment is going to be shaped a lot by the goals of the platform, and org. If your org’s goal is increased developer productivity BUT you are in a big government institution that cannot increase risk for security or compliance - your calculation is going to be different. There will be recurring patterns and it’s good to have a solid framework definitely, but this is why it’s so important to figure these things out ASAP before launching into a full blown company wide platform engineering revolution What do you think @María Isabel Martín Serrano?

Actually yes, having worked in heavily regulated industries (transportation, safety, investment, space) the idea of a “platform as a safety net” with built-in end to end capabilities for compliance, security, governance… Is quite appealing. Without falling into Conway’s law, platforms should embody somehow not their organisation itself, but the challenges that are specific to it (context, market, their “moment”…). In that sense, the platform for a tech startup may and should look different than the one for a company in the space domain. Also platforms evolve with their organisation, the initial focus for that platform at the startup was likely “growth”, at some point it would need to shift to “business sustainability”, “reduction” (heavy focus on SRE, FinOps…)