Platform Engineering Series | #2 Why Platforms and Who They Are For

Platforms help product teams deliver value to the business, faster and safer.

🎯 What Is the Goal?

The main goal of platform engineering isn’t to use cool tech or buzzwords:

Platforms help product teams deliver value to the business, faster and safer.

João Alves, Head of Engineering, Adevinta

Platform teams talk to developers and to the product, run internal surveys, and spot pain points. Then they turn those learnings into reusable solutions—like deployment templates, monitoring dashboards, or golden paths for spinning up a new service.

Don’t do technology for the sake of technology.
Listen to what teams need and build to solve real problems.

João Alves, Head of Engineering, Adevinta

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Welcome to the Platform Engineering Series, where I explain platform engineering, why platform teams exist, and what they are solving, along with all the jargon, such as DevOps, SRE, SLOs, etc.

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Who Is Platform Engineering For?

You might think platform engineering is only for massive companies like Google or Amazon, but that’s not true.

Even a team of 20–50 developers can benefit from having a small group of engineers focusing on internal tooling and workflows. As João explained, it's about leverage: a few engineers can make many engineers more productive. And whether you're launching one website or a hundred, there’s always value in having one clear, secure, and reliable way to do it.

Big orgs might need whole platform departments. Small teams might only need one or two people working on internal tooling. It’s all about scale.

João Alves, Head of Enginreering, Adevinta

Is This Still Relevant in the Age of AI?