When the Platform Team Becomes the Bottleneck

I recently gave a talk called “Your Platform Team Is the Bottleneck: Operating Internal Platforms at Enterprise Scale,” and the title wasn’t meant to be provocative for its own sake. It’s just what I keep seeing. I’ve been a platform engineer, and I’ve owned platform teams, and the pattern repeats itself almost every time an organisation grows past a certain size: the team that was supposed to remove friction becomes the place where everything gets stuck.