Charlotte Fleming

Platform Engineering has matured rapidly from a frontier practice to a mainstream industry-standard. Drawing on Octopus Deploy's Future of Platform Engineering research, this talk presents what the data shows about platform adoption across organizations, and what separates the platforms delivering real value from those that don't. The findings challenge some common assumptions. Mandated adoption consistently outperforms optional. And what platform builders believe they've delivered rarely matches what developers report experiencing, a pattern that shows up repeatedly in underperforming platforms. The data also surfaces where platforms stall. Build-versus-buy decisions, unclear success metrics, and unanticipated obstacles are recurring themes among platforms that lose momentum after launch. What gets measured, and how teams decide what to build next, turns out to matter as much as the initial architecture. This talk examines the adoption, decision-making, and organizational dynamics that tend to receive less attention than the engineering, and what the data suggests about where effort is most often misplaced.