The Future of Platform Engineering Report

Organizations adopt platforms primarily for automation and efficiency purposes. Developer experience is still a consideration, but less of a priority for most. When they explain why the initiative was funded, automation comes first. This was a consistent finding in our previous report, the 2025 Platform Engineering Pulse report.

The motivation behind platform adoption is important as it shapes how success is measured. A platform funded for efficiency reasons and later judged on developer experience will look like a failure that isn’t one. Teams that name their primary motivation early have a clearer basis for knowing whether the platform worked.

Struggling teams most often report a lack of clear strategy as their obstacle, ahead of the technical complexity of building a platform.

Organizations that predominantly build their platform features from scratch are also the most likely to report this gap. Of respondents building from scratch, 57.9% also cite a lack of a clear strategy as an obstacle. While this may suggest that teams are building without a plan, many engineers build to work out a problem, which makes the build a method rather than a problem. This would explain why these two often turn up together.