Design is Your Platform Engineering Superpower

The world of platform engineering is rapidly evolving, often prioritizing technical excellence and speed. However, there's a powerful, yet frequently overlooked, element that can transform your platform from a functional tool to a widely adopted, loved product: Design. Our CEO Colin Griffin and Senior UX Designer Ryan Hallak were recently selected to present at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (full video here) on the importance of User Experience (UX) as strategic imperative that can drive massive success for your Internal Developer Platform (IDP).

The core belief is simple: If your platform is difficult to use, engineers will bypass it, creating shadow IT and slowing down the entire development lifecycle.

When we talk about design in the context of platform engineering, we must move past the narrow definition of UI/UX. It’s about users first. Your users are your internal engineering teams, and their experience directly impacts your company's efficiency and productivity. Treating your platform as a product requires applying the same user-centric mindset you would for a consumer-facing application.

The Business Case for Design Investment

Investing in design is not an optional luxury—it’s a massive cost-saver and growth accelerator. Design-first thinking, proven across countless product development processes, yields clear benefits that are even amplified for internal platforms:

• Increased Adoption: Drive up adoption by as much as 25%.
• Reduced Onboarding Time: Cut down the time and resources spent bringing new hires or teams onto the platform.
• Faster Product Development: Systemized design processes naturally lead to reduced time to development.

Most critically, catching a mistake early during the design and research phase is the cheapest fix. A dollar spent on design can save $10 spent on a change during development, and up to $100 after the product is released.

The Iterative Design Process for Platforms

The traditional five-step design process can be directly applied to platform engineering, ensuring a user-centric and efficient approach:

1. Empathize: Conduct user research by speaking with your team members—developers, junior engineers, front-end engineers, and senior architects. The goal is to set aside your assumptions (the "engineer bias") and truly understand the problems and frustrations of a day-one junior engineer performing a simple task.
2. Define: Compile and synthesize all your findings. Catalog your user research insights to inform your roadmap and prioritization.
3. Ideate: Focus on generating new ideas and challenging your existing assumptions. Do not fall into the trap of designing for yourself.
4. Prototype: Rapidly create low-resource solutions to facilitate conversation and build excitement for the platform across the company.
5. Test: Testing your platform is simple: Ask questions. Buy a developer coffee. Have a discussion about why they aren't using the platform, rather than forcing them to. Use the feedback to drive an iterative process.

Actionable Steps: Implementing Design Today

• Find a Shared Initiative: Identify a small project (like a component system or process documentation) that both platform engineers and designers can work on together to break down silos.
• Clarify the Scope: Start small. Define what your platform is, even if it's currently just a Command Line Interface (CLI), and let it grow from a clear starting point.
• Give it a Name: Give your platform an identity that people can get behind and take pride in.
• Create Your Product Team: Involve other teams—product managers, researchers, and designers—in the platform engineering process. Building a "council" of representative users ensures you maintain the platform in a way that everyone trusts.
• Build Contributor Pathways: Involve consumers of the platform early on to help build and grow it, following guiding principles like being open and extensible.

By involving design early and treating your platform like the valuable product it is, you can shortcut the adoption life cycle, build trust, and ensure your platform becomes the indispensable superpower for your organization!