The Tragedy of Platform Leverage

Modern organisations love the idea of platform teams. They promise leverage, enablement, and autonomy at scale. In theory, platform engineering offers the clean architecture of reuse, components abstracted, infrastructure handled, dev environments spun up in seconds.

In practice, however, many of these teams end up bloated, reactive, and resented, not because of failure on their part, but because they are often left to carry the burden of alignment alone.

Platform teams deserve recognition. Most continue to operate with deep intent, building reusable foundations, coordinating across silos, and delivering technical coherence under pressure. They work in the gaps, bridging product divergence with systems thinking. Yet they are too often left unsupported.

This failure is not theirs, but more of leadership failure. Platform work does not decay because the engineers lack vision, but because organisational leaders fail to provide clarity, consistency, and cross-cutting steering. They expect leverage without investment. Reuse without governance. Innovation without participation.

Platform teams' success requires partnership and they are rarely treated as partners.

Platform as Leverage - Not Infrastructure

Platform teams are not infrastructure vendors. They are not passive support centres. Their purpose is to enable others to move faster with greater confidence and lower cost. This is not achieved by delivering tools alone, but by shaping the conditions in which those tools become effective.

Building true leverage is a smart, continuous job that requires aligning a visionary platform strategy with the ever-changing agendas of product teams and the broader company roadmap.

When platform teams are treated as vending machines for developer convenience, their leverage evaporates. They become responders to requests, not designers of systemic capability.

Process Refusal and the Rise of the Scapegoat

The most dangerous dynamic is not technical, but cultural. Teams that refuse to engage with process create a vacuum. And into that vacuum, blame flows. Platform teams become scapegoats for everything that goes wrong:

• "We cannot deliver because the platform is not ready."
• "We do not have the tools."
• "It is too slow."

But rarely do those same teams attempt to participate in defining the platform, integrating with it early, or shaping its evolution. Ownership is offloaded. Creativity dies. Collaboration becomes optional.

A typical manifestation of this disengagement is seen in customer-facing teams who push priorities onto platform backlogs without context, integration, or follow-through. I looks more as abdication rather than collaboration. The moment a team externalises its dependencies without investing in joint alignment, it signals the deepest form of disengagement. Platform teams are then blamed for not delivering on goals that were never jointly understood in the first place.

The Tragedy of the Engineering Commons

This dynamic mirrors a well-known philosophical pattern: the tragedy of the commons. Each team, acting in its own immediate interest, disengages from the shared platform effort. They avoid process. They build in isolation. They push responsibility outward. And the result is predictable: the common resource, the platform itself, degrades or fails to ever be delivered. Its coherence unravels. Its usefulness declines.

More engineers are hired into platform teams to "fix it", but this rarely addresses the root cause. The sinkhole expands. Meanwhile, the original sin remains unaddressed: the absence of real leadership to steer collaboration, enforce accountability, and cultivate system-wide clarity.

In rare, healthy environments, product and platform teams collaborate with intention. They review priorities together. They co-own outcomes. They align their timelines and learn from shared feedback loops. In such settings, platform work becomes catalytic, an accelerant to delivery rather than an afterthought.

But acceleration is not the same as wisdom. When customer-facing teams obsess over the wrong objectives, vanity metrics, surface features, or urgent noise, platform enablement does not correct the course. It simply gets them to the wrong destination faster.

Speed without clarity is not a benefit. It is a liability.

Consider how Facebook’s powerful internal platforms enabled rapid experimentation, but also allowed the unchecked spread of misinformation and polarising content. Or how Boeing’s internal engineering leverage enabled the rushed development of the 737 MAX, sacrificing safety for speed. Even Google, with some of the best developer tooling in the world, amplified the misalignment of Google+ across its products without real user demand.

Leverage amplifies what already exists ... for better or for worse.

Teams must review priorities together. They must co-own outcomes. They align their timelines and learn from shared feedback loops. In such settings, platform work becomes catalytic, an accelerant to delivery rather than an afterthought. These examples remain rare not because they are difficult, but because they demand maturity and shared discipline. Meanwhile, the original sin remains unaddressed: the absence of real leadership to steer collaboration, enforce accountability, and cultivate system-wide clarity.

Not Just Skills - But Intimacy

It is tempting to diagnose this as a skills gap. That misses the point. The real issue is one of intimacy. Teams no longer understand how their tools work. They do not speak to neighbouring teams. They do not touch the processes they depend on. Platform teams are left guessing, often building for imagined users instead of real ones.

Distance kills systems. Without proximity, without the tight, messy, feedback-rich contact between stakeholders, no platform can thrive. Stakeholder teams must align holistically with company goals so that their priorities, language, and direction form a unified source of truth, something platform teams can rely on. Without this alignment, there is no north star. The organisation drifts like a boat without a compass, slowly, silently, and without course.

From Support to Sinkhole

The loop is vicious:

1. Teams disengage.
2. Platform teams overcompensate.
3. Complexity grows.
4. Trust declines.
5. More engineers are added.
6. The platform becomes harder to use.

Soon, the platform is no longer a foundation. It is a weight. A slow, opaque, overengineered maze few understand and fewer use. The ones who stayed, platform engineers, carry the blame for a failure that was never theirs to own alone.

Reversing the Trend - Extreme Ownership, Systemic Honesty, and Fractal Responsibility

The way back is not heroic engineering. It is systemic honesty. The real enemy is not complexity but disengagement. Across failing organisations, we see the same corrosive loop: lack of ownership, scapegoating, and political manoeuvring replacing actual collaboration. Teams defer responsibility. They focus on optics instead of outcomes. They build narratives instead of systems. Platform teams become the natural targets of frustration, not because they failed, but because they remained present when others walked away.

To break this loop, teams must embrace what Jocko Willink calls extreme ownership. Not in name, but in practice. Like a famous Elvis' song put it, we need "a little less conversation, a little more action, please". Because too often, what passes for alignment is just theatre.

This erosion of substance is not a flaw of process but a failure of leadership. When leadership does not model clarity, courage, and coherence, teams follow suit. Disengagement spreads. Accountability fades. What remains is motion without direction, structure without purpose.

Only then does the platform become what it was meant to be: not a sinkhole, but a scaffold. A quiet multiplier of meaningful work.

And yet, standing for the right process often comes at a cost. Sometimes it is better to look like the difficult one, or even be let go, than to compromise on principles. Integrity in these environments is not always rewarded. But in a landscape shaped by disengagement and misdirected blame, silence is complicity. These dynamics create war fields, not workplaces, and they demand courage. The courage to name the dysfunction. The courage to face the relentless absence of ownership. And the courage to walk alone, if needed, so others may eventually walk together.

But there is also hope. Integrity attracts alignment. Truth builds trust. In time, principled resistance plants seeds. One courageous platform leader can shift the tone of an entire organisation, if not immediately, then in how future teams inherit their example. That is the slow victory: not just fixing the system, but inspiring the next person who dares to try.

If this resonates with your experience, whether as a platform engineer, product leader, or CTO, I would love to hear how you have navigated these tensions. What helped you reclaim alignment and accountability?