Inside Platform Engineering with Steve Wade
I recently sat down with Steve Wade, founder of Platform Fix, for the second episode of our Inside Platform Engineering series. Steve works with companies whose platform migrations have gone sideways - 18 months late, millions over budget, teams falling apart. His perspective comes from having been in that exact position himself early in his career.
One of the core challenges Steve highlighted is what he calls “resume-driven architecture”, where Platform teams collect tools like Pokémon cards rather than solving business problems. He shared a story about a fintech company where a new senior platform engineer proposed an impressive architecture: Kubernetes, Istio, Argo CD, Crossplane, Backstage, Vault, and a full observability stack. When Steve arrived months later to help, the migration had cost $2.3 million, developers were still waiting 2-3 weeks for deployments, and the platform team was working weekends.
Steve also introduced a practical framework he calls the “deletion protocol”, a systematic approach to identifying and removing unnecessary complexity. He emphasized that platforms aren’t matured by adding things, but instead by deleting things and reducing complexity. The conversation also touched on measuring platform success through what Steve calls a “complexity score”, evaluating cognitive load, operational overhead, and team morale.
If you’re dealing with platform complexity, struggling to demonstrate value, or wondering whether you’re building the right things, this conversation offers practical frameworks and honest perspectives from someone who’s worked through these challenges many times. Check it out at the top of this post, and visit our Inside Platform Engineering Playlist on YouTube for more discussions.
