What if the platform you're racing to build is the very mechanism that will slow your startup down when speed matters most?

Platform engineering has become a cargo cult. Startups implement internal developer platforms, golden paths, and "enterprise-grade" tooling before they've outgrown their sneakers-only to find themselves bogged down by the coordination costs they sought to eliminate. This book argues that platforms are not growth accelerators but stabilizers: governance mechanisms that trade flexibility for predictability, best deployed only when uncertainty ceases to be productive.

Drawing on how platforms historically emerge-not as strategic investments but as defensive reactions to coordination collapse-this text dismantles the mythology that treats DevOps, IDPs, and developer experience as universally applicable virtues. It examines why early abstraction often suppresses learning more than it enables scale, why mandates create compliance without legitimacy, and why the most dangerous platforms are those that function perfectly too early in an organization's life. Written for technical leaders who feel the first friction of growth, this book treats platform engineering as institutional decision-making: a way to settle debates, allocate authority, and encode memory. It argues for radical restraint in what is centralized, standardized, enforced, and measured-not because platforms lack power, but because power applied without clarity rarely produces intended outcomes.

• Why the platforms that succeed long-term are built with deliberate restraint rather than ambitious "future-proofing" • How importing enterprise solutions without importing the conditions that necessitated them creates category errors, not technical debt • The counterintuitive case for preserving local autonomy until repeated choices become costly enough to justify standardization • Why metrics mislead when they replace judgment, and how to recognize when your team is ready to stop having certain technical arguments

If your infrastructure feels like it is preparing you for a company you might become rather than serving who you actually are, this book provides the critical framework for deciding which coordination problems deserve permanent solutions-and which should remain unresolved a little longer.