7 Ways to Fail at Building a Platform

Submitted to DevBcn 2026 (Barcelona) on . Rejected .

Level
Intermediate
Length
Session
Track
Cloud, DevOps, Kubernetes

Abstract, as submitted

Building your own internal developer platform can seem attractive, but it's a risky proposition. In a platform as a product approach, when you build it, you own it, and now you're in the business of developing a product instead of your actual business. In this talk, drawing from 10 years of platform engineering case studies of large organizations, Coté will go over seven risks of building your own platform: expansive scopes, underestimating cost, project mindsets, death by customization, skills, security and compliance, resume-driven development. You can learn from the many people who've suffered these risks already and, hopefully, avoid them yourself.

This is the text that went into the CFP form, kept as submitted - not a later rewrite of it. Talks get retitled and reworked between submission and stage, so what was actually delivered may differ.