Member post originally published on the Mia-Platform blog by Graziano Casto, DevRel Engineer, Mia-Platform
TLDR: After years of helping people adopt digital platforms, we created the Platform Journey Map, a visual game that sparks meaningful discussions on strategy and priorities.
People often focus on technology when discussing platforms, debating which tool is better or which solution to choose. This can cause them to lose sight of the bigger picture, like wearing blinders.
Think of it this way: you could build the most advanced kitchen with the best tools and appliances. But if you don’t involve the chefs or train them, what’s the point? What kind of food would come out? You don’t need a huge oven to make a sandwich. It’s the same with digital platforms. Tools alone won’t work without involving people and having a clear strategy.
Platforms: From Automation to a Circular Economy of Software
The traditional narrative of platform engineering makes us think of platforms as closely tied to concepts like environment-as-a-service or infrastructure automation. This is true, but only if we ignore the fact that a platform initiative exists within a much larger context.
Over the past few years, working with various organizations across different industries to adopt digital platforms, we’ve noticed a common pattern: the approach to platform initiatives often follows a standard path.
Most organizations step into the world of platforms aiming to provide self-service tools and processes for provisioning infrastructure, enabling developers to manage it with greater autonomy. A typical example is building a platform to abstract the complexity of managing distributed environments on Kubernetes, allowing even less experienced developers to harness its potential through automation provided by the platform team.
A trend we’ve observed in how these initiatives evolve is the desire to extend the concept of self-service. This shift focuses on other areas of software development, prioritizing developer experience by simplifying coding and deployment. As the initiative matures, the platform increasingly integrates into various aspects of the organization. It centralizes governance across the entire software development lifecycle, optimizes processes and supports a composable approach to building complex software systems.
What happens is the creation, consciously or not, of a kind of circular economy within the platform. The work of some teams is made available for others to reuse, building something new that can, in turn, be shared again. This fuels a marketplace of composable elements made up of data, containers, and APIs.
Platform Adoption: Aligning Strategy, Goals, and Metrics for Success
Adopting a platform is a step-by-step journey, and for any organization embarking on this kind of initiative, it’s crucial to conduct a comprehensive and realistic self-assessment. This means painting a clear picture of its starting point, identifying the challenges engineers will face in their daily activities, recognizing bottlenecks that impact the business, and acknowledging the processes that work but could clearly be approached more efficiently and effectively. Based on these challenges, organizations can start defining the milestones of their journey – the goals they aim to achieve with their platform.
Some organizations may first need to focus on modernizing their infrastructure and consolidating their software lifecycle before diving into creating paved paths and automations to enable environments as a service. Others, already advanced in technical excellence within their architecture and software lifecycle, might see the introduction of paved paths and automations as a foundational step leading to initiatives that address business-oriented metrics, such as reducing time-to-market. This could involve adopting a composable approach to application development or tailoring the platform to support specific market use cases.
The key point is that any initiative, platform-related or not, requires clarity about the starting point and the goals to achieve. This clarity allows organizations to chart the right course, supported by appropriate metrics, ensuring they stay on track. These metrics also serve as a universal language for discussions among the various stakeholders, who often come from diverse backgrounds and have different areas of focus.
This is the crux: objectives, strategy, and metrics must come first so that everyone, technical and non-technical alike, can be involved in the initiative from the outset.
Business and technical teams need a clear idea of their goals for the platform before focusing on details. This includes deciding which tools to use, whether to build the first MVP with a vendor or in-house, and how to improve an existing platform.
A platform is not just a technical tool. Adopting a platform is not merely about discussing whether to choose ArgoCD or Flux for deployment management. A platform is a product with a broader vision, designed to create value for everyone. It aims to make technical work easier while also considering business stakeholders, who must be involved from the very beginning. This ensures that the value boundaries are clearly defined, avoiding misunderstandings and reducing the risk of early failure in the initiative.
The strategic tool to guide your Platform Adoption: the Platform Journey Map
At Mia-Platform, the adoption of digital platforms is our bread and butter. To better support the platform adoption journey, we’ve mapped many of the trends and patterns we’ve observed over the years. From this, we’ve developed a visual tool, almost like a board game, designed to foster meaningful discussions around platform initiatives among the various stakeholders involved.
We decided to call this tool the Platform Journey Map to emphasize its role as a guide in defining the priorities and strategy for your platform, a vision we had in mind when creating it.
The Platform Journey Map outlines all the steps, from zero to hero, that we have observed through years of field experience. It analyzes how organizations across various industries adopt digital platforms and use them to develop their products. The map has different tiles representing the goals companies aim to achieve with a platform. The paved journey is designed to foster meaningful discussion around the following topics:
- Software Lifecycle: Infrastructure modernization, software delivery efficiency, runtime optimization.
- Modern Architecture and Data: API platform, microservices transition, legacy modernization, integration patterns, evolutionary architectures, data products.
- Platform Engineering: Infrastructure and DevOps orchestration, environments as a service, templates and paved roads, Platform as a Product, metrics and observability, and Team Topologies.
- Business Composability: Packaged business capabilities, internal developer portal and software catalog, micro frontends, application composition, low-code and no-code governance.
- Market Use Case: Omni-channel experiences, Software as a Service and platform business, Open-X and embedded services.
The tool’s purpose is to help organizations plot their own platform adoption journey. The first step is to identify your starting point. Are you at the tiles related to the software lifecycle, or have you already made progress and are positioned closer to architecture modernization? Once this is clear, you can start discussing which tiles you aim to select. Do you want to address business composability? If so, what needs to happen first? Does it make sense to restructure team organization following the principles of Team Topologies? The game’s design invites all stakeholders to participate, raising important questions and sparking meaningful conversations.
Once you’ve identified the tiles you want to select during your platform adoption campaign, you can dive deeper into strategies and metrics, identifying KPIs to define the adoption success. How should your Platform Team be structured? Which stream of the organization should you prioritize first? Which products or partners should be targeted in this initiative? Are your monitoring systems adequate as they are, or do you need to collect different metrics?
By playing this game with all platform stakeholders, you ensure that everyone is involved and committed to this effort from day one, reducing the risk of the platform initiative failing before it even starts, whether due to misalignment with the business or discrepancies in the objectives to be achieved.
Building the journey together ensures that everyone follows the agreed-upon path, avoiding unpleasant surprises along the way.
Guidelines for Defining Your Platform Strategy
Before using this tool, it’s important to understand and follow its simple guidelines.
- it’s a tool designed for discussion and brainstorming, meant to help you define the boundaries of your strategy.
- There’s no strict, linear path where your pieces must follow every step in sequence. Instead, think of it as a map, where the focus is on identifying and prioritizing what truly matters for your organization.
- Some cards represent overlapping concepts. For instance, governance might fall under both the API Platform and Templates and Paved Roads categories. This is perfectly fine, just make sure to explain the reasoning behind your choices and use this flexibility to support deeper discussions.
Approach the tool with this mindset, and let it guide you in shaping a strategy tailored to your platform journey.
Now it’s your turn to use the Platform Journey Map
We spent countless times developing and enhancing this tool internally before unveiling it publicly in October 2024 with a dedicated workshop at KCD UK. The workshop was a great success, and an interview published on the topic reached a very huge audience in a very short time.
Despite the excitement, this tool is still in its early stages. That’s why we encourage you to download the tool and its rules, use it, have fun, and share your feedback to help us make it even better for the community.
Have you encountered different steps in your platform adoption journey? Leave us your feedback at this email (platformjourneymap@mia-platform.eu) and share your story! We’re excited to hear from you and integrate your experiences into the tool.