Why are Platform deliveries so slow!

Lets fix it!

In the last blog, we talked about how to build better platforms and now let’s cover how to move faster to delight the users.

• Blog-1 → How platforms help
• Blog-2 → How to approach platforms to make them more effective
• Blog-3 → What causes platforms to slow the teams down.
• Blog-4 → when should you start investing in building out a platform.

In today’s fast-paced digital economy, organizations rely on technology platforms to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and enhance collaboration across teams. Ideally, these platforms should enable teams to move faster by automating workflows, consolidating data, and reducing manual overhead. However, despite these intentions, platforms often end up doing the opposite — slowing teams down. Understanding why platforms, meant to enhance productivity, can have the opposite effect is crucial for product leaders, engineers, and business stakeholders.

Here are the primary reasons platforms can become bottlenecks instead of enablers:

1. Over-Engineering and Complexity

Platforms can become overly complex due to continuous feature additions, customizations, and rigid workflows. Teams end up spending more time navigating and maintaining these systems than working on what truly matters. This complexity arises from:

• Lack of simplicity: Over time, platforms evolve into sprawling ecosystems with too many options, making it difficult for teams to use them efficiently.
• One-size-fits-all approach: Trying to cater to too many teams and use cases results in a platform that is packed with unnecessary features and complexity.
• Too many integrations: More integrations mean more dependencies. When any of these integrated systems face issues, the entire platform slows down.

2. Rigid Processes and Governance

Many platforms enforce strict governance and rigid processes that can stifle agility. While governance is necessary for security and compliance, excessive restrictions make it difficult for teams to adapt to fast-changing requirements. Some common symptoms include:

• Limited customization: Teams can’t modify workflows or tools quickly enough to meet evolving needs, leading to delays in delivery.
• Bureaucratic approvals: Requiring multiple approvals for simple changes can hinder rapid iterations, preventing teams from moving forward with urgent tasks.

3. Poor User Experience

Platforms that are not intuitive or user-friendly can frustrate teams, leading to time wastage and productivity loss. A poor user experience may involve:

• Clunky interfaces: Non-intuitive user interfaces result in employees spending extra time figuring out how to accomplish basic tasks.
• Inconsistent workflows: When platforms are not designed for seamless navigation, users often have to switch between multiple interfaces and tools to get their work done, creating frustration and inefficiency.

4. Technical Debt Accumulation

Technical debt — the cost of shortcuts taken in development — accumulates over time, degrading the platform’s performance. Teams are forced to deal with outdated infrastructure and legacy systems, which require constant patching and maintenance, resulting in:

• Slow system performance: As technical debt piles up, platforms take longer to load, and performance slows down across the board, limiting team effectiveness.
• Unplanned maintenance: When technical debt is neglected, issues arise unexpectedly, leading to costly downtime and distracting teams from focusing on value-added work.

5. Dependency Hell

Platforms often introduce dependencies between different teams, tools, and processes. When one part of the system experiences issues, it affects the entire pipeline, leading to delays. Examples include:

• Cross-team dependencies: When one team must wait on another to make updates or approve changes, the flow of work is interrupted, slowing down the delivery process.
• Interdependent services: A failure in one part of the platform (e.g., a service outage) can impact multiple teams that rely on that specific functionality.

6. Lack of Real-Time Feedback

Fast iterations and quick learning are key to agility, but platforms that fail to offer real-time feedback slow teams down. Without timely insights, teams are forced to rely on assumptions or manual monitoring. The absence of real-time feedback leads to:

• Delayed decision-making: Teams may have to wait for reports, causing a slowdown in making informed decisions.
• Reactive troubleshooting: Teams waste valuable time addressing issues after the fact, instead of leveraging proactive alerts and diagnostics.

7. Inadequate Training and Onboarding

Teams are only as fast as their ability to use the tools at their disposal. Platforms with steep learning curves or inadequate training and onboarding slow down teams, especially when new members join. Key pain points include:

• Insufficient documentation: Without comprehensive documentation, team members must rely on trial and error or wait for support from more experienced colleagues.
• Long onboarding periods: New employees take longer to become productive if they cannot quickly familiarize themselves with the platform.

8. Misalignment Between Platform and Team Needs

A platform may have been the right solution when it was initially adopted, but as the organization evolves, so do team needs. If the platform fails to adapt, it becomes a constraint rather than an enabler. Common reasons for misalignment include:

• Outdated capabilities: If the platform can’t keep up with modern development practices (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, microservices architecture), teams will be forced to create workarounds or switch tools.
• Siloed platform evolution: When platform owners focus more on scaling or new features than addressing user pain points, the platform’s evolution can outpace or move away from team needs.

Solutions to Keep Platforms Agile and Efficient

To prevent platforms from slowing teams down, product and engineering leaders should focus on:

• Focus on clear usecases: specicify your top target team ( ICP), identify their usecase and build a generic capablity that can be easily extende. As a platform team your job is to accelerate the product team not assist them.
• Regularly simplifying and decluttering: Conduct audits to remove unused or redundant features that no longer add value.
• Building flexible workflows: Adopt a modular approach that allows teams to customize workflows without breaking core platform functionality.
• Balancing governance with agility: Establish guardrails for security and compliance but allow enough flexibility for teams to adapt quickly.
• Investing in user experience: Continuously improve the UI/UX to ensure that the platform is intuitive, easy to use, and aligns with real-world workflows.
• Proactively managing technical debt: Allocate resources to address technical debt and maintain optimal platform performance.
• Fostering alignment: Ensure the platform’s roadmap evolves in tandem with the needs of the teams that rely on it.

By keeping platforms streamlined, adaptable, and user-centric, organizations can prevent them from becoming bottlenecks and instead use them to unlock greater productivity and innovation.