Hi @Paula Kennedy. When you talk about reducing cognitive load, how to meet a good balance? So that devs don’t feel under challenged at some time. Or have the feeling that abstractions not only hide complexity but also the ability to dive really deep.

Great question. Balance is important and the answer very much depends on the developer needs. Part of treating the platform as a product involves collaborating with the product teams / app developers to understand their requirements and provide the right level of abstraction. By paving golden paths, platform team could potentially offer a "quick route" and a "deep dive" route to give teams optionality.

This is one of the trickiest things platform teams need to get right! Finding the right level of abstraction for teams of different sophistication levels can be quite challenging

I used zero point stories in the backlog to provide a signal to the platform team on what needed to be automated. Velocity is useful in a dev team to isolate waste. If a team is dealing with infrastructure for two days, that is not developing a feature, so we would assign 0 points to those stories. If we see that replicated across teams, we can target automation to remove the drag

I think part of the problem is devs spend so much time trying to find code and even understand it that it diminishes potential time they could be writing new code. Companies must work to shift this in order to enable devs to spend less time searching and even navigating to the code they need.