I've spent twenty years building and scaling platforms across financial services technology. In that time I've seen internal developer platforms succeed and I've seen them fail. The technical differences between the successes and the failures are smaller than you'd expect.

The organisational differences are enormous.

The adoption problem nobody talks about

Most IDP failures share a common characteristic: the platform team

treated adoption as inevitable rather than earned.

The assumption goes like this, if we build something genuinely better

than what exists, developers will naturally migrate to it. This is

rarely true. Developers are busy, sceptical of platform initiatives

based on past experience, and rational about where they invest their

time.

The teams that get adoption right treat the platform as a product with a go-to-market problem.…