Deciding When to Build a Platform

Platform thinking is often treated as a marker of maturity. In practice, it is a commitment — and a costly one if made too early.

I’ve learned to pause before choosing a platform approach and ask whether multiple teams or users are solving the same class of problems repeatedly, whether solutions need to scale without proportional human effort, and whether long-term flexibility truly outweighs short-term speed.

When these signals are weak, platforms become over-engineered abstractions that slow teams down.

The biggest platform failures I’ve seen were not technical — they were premature.

Platform success comes from restraint: starting with clear primitives, delaying abstraction until patterns stabilise, and optimising for learning before extensibility.