Platform engineering has become the industry’s latest cure‑all, but behind the glossy diagrams and “golden paths,” many teams are quietly wrestling with platforms that are overbuilt, under‑adopted, and impossible to evolve. The problem isn’t tooling. It’s the fantasy that a platform can succeed without clear contracts, intentional boundaries, and metrics that reflect real value instead of vanity velocity.

This session dismantles the myths that keep platform teams stuck. You’ll see why most internal platforms fail long before the first service onboards, how “self‑service” becomes a liability when contracts are vague, and why CI/CD pipelines turn into organizational choke points when treated as plumbing instead of products.

From there, we rebuild the model: contract‑driven integration surfaces, delivery workflows designed as user journeys, and success measures that expose friction, cognitive load, and change survivability. No hype. No heroics. Just the patterns that actually scale inside real organizations.

If you’re tired of platform theater and want a brutally honest, experience‑backed guide to building something teams will *actually use*, this session will give you the clarity and the courage to rethink your approach.