Scaling Platform Engineering: Lessons from Europe’s Largest Enterprises

Platform engineering is no longer new. Most large organisations now have a platform team to help product and application teams deliver faster and more reliably. But as demand grows, a key question emerges: who helps the platform team scale its own impact?
In this panel, platform leaders from some of Europe’s largest enterprises will share real-world stories of how they built, structured, and grew their internal platform organisations. You’ll hear what worked (and what didn’t!) when it came to getting internal buy-in, evangelising platform thinking across the business, and hiring and evolving the team.
Whether you’re starting a platform team from scratch or trying to take your current one to the next level, this session will leave you with actionable insights, hard-earned lessons, and inspiration from those who’ve done it at enterprise scale.

50 Shades of Platforms

While the promises of platform engineering are frequently highlighted, this panel will dive into the messy realities that practitioners face daily—from organizational resistance and integration hurdles to adoption challenges and technical debt.
Our distinguished panel of platform engineering veterans will share candid experiences, failed experiments, hard-won lessons, and practical strategies for navigating the difficult terrain between platform vision and operational reality. Rather than presenting a sanitized success story, this discussion will illuminate the genuine struggles and solutions that define effective platform engineering in today's enterprise landscape.

Product Thinking for Cloud Native Engineers

Want to level up your engineering career? Product management and ownership skills will help you showcase the business value of IT investments and align technical solutions with company goals. Learn how modern engineering teams—regardless of size or industry—can thrive by adopting a product thinking mindset.

Join Stéphane (Cloud Engineer applying product thinking) and Cat (once engineer, now Product Manager) as they share actionable insights from their journey. You'll discover how embracing product management principles can help your team deliver more impactful results and gain greater ownership of what you build.

What you'll learn:
- How to use product discovery techniques to better understand user needs
- Which metrics matter most when measuring product success
- Practical frameworks for identifying real problems before jumping to solutions
- Tips for bringing product thinking to your engineering role

Introducing a Product Mindset in a Platform Team

Your container platform is up to speed technically and your most advanced developers are already running production workloads.
But – legacy developers see you as a new operations team, are skeptical about cloud-native concepts – and on top of it, your finance team is politely asking: why do we actually need a team of platform engineers? After all, “you build it, you run it”?

This session will build on the experience we had with creating and establishing an infrastructure platform in one of the largest online banks in Germany. We will talk about what we achieved, the challenges we encountered along the way – both general challenges and challenges specific to our area.

In particular, we will explain why introducing a product mindset helped us focus on value for our users, and how we did it in practice.

Product Thinking 101 for Platform Engineers

Want to level up your engineering career? Product management and ownership skills will help you showcase the business value of IT investments and align technical solutions with company goals. Learn how modern engineering teams – regardless of size or industry – can thrive by adopting a product thinking mindset. Stéphane is a Platform Engineer applying product thinking, who will give you actionable insights from his journey at DKB. You'll discover how embracing product management principles can help your team deliver more impactful results and gain greater ownership of what you build.

What you'll learn:

- How to use product discovery techniques to better understand user needs
- Which metrics matter most when measuring product success
- Practical frameworks for identifying real problems before jumping to solutions
- Tips for bringing product thinking to your engineering role

https://devopscon.io/business-company-culture/platform-engineers-product-thinking-principles