Many organizations talk about Platform Engineering, but few are prepared for what it actually takes to move from a traditional DevOps team to a real platform team.

In this talk, I’ll share real lessons learned from transforming a small DevOps team supporting over 200 engineers into a Platform Engineering team. We’ll walk through what worked, what failed, and where theory broke down when faced with legacy services, urgent requests, and rapid company growth.

We’ll cover how self service platforms reduce bottlenecks but fail without standardization, why Golden Paths are critical but painful to adopt, and why enforcement is often the missing piece no one likes to talk about. This session focuses on practical decisions, trade offs, and mistakes, not idealized architectures.

Attendees will leave with concrete guidance on where to start, what to avoid, and how to think about Platform Engineering as a mindset rather than a single tool or portal.