Platform teams invest heavily in "developer experience" yet struggle with adoption. Why? We focus on infrastructure while developers spend most of their time writing software, not deploying it.

This talk examines how platform engineering's infrastructure bias creates blind spots. Developers need local cloud API access, language-native libraries, and test data management - not just deployment pipelines. Some organizations are expanding platform scope: providing SDKs, enabling local workflows, automating test environments, even leveraging AI for cross-repository search.

You'll learn to identify gaps between what platforms provide and what developers actually need, see examples of platforms that moved "up the stack," and understand why broader scope drives adoption. It's time to expand our definition of platform engineering beyond CI/CD, Terraform and Kubernetes.