5 Metrics That Actually Matter for Platform Teams
Stop tracking vanity metrics. Here's what successful platform engineering teams measure to prove value and drive adoption.
Sarah Chen
Staff Engineer at Spotify
When I started leading the platform team at Spotify, we made a classic mistake: we measured everything we could, then drowned in dashboards nobody looked at. It took us six months to realize we were tracking the wrong things entirely.
The problem with most platform metrics is they focus on what the platform does rather than what it enables. Your executives do not care how many deployments your CI/CD pipeline processed. They care whether engineering teams are shipping faster and more reliably.
1. Developer Time to First Deployment
This is the single most important metric for any platform team. How long does it take a new developer or a developer on a new project to go from zero to their first production deployment?
If your platform takes more than a day for a competent engineer to deploy something meaningful, you have work to do.
2. Platform Adoption Rate
The best platform in the world is worthless if nobody uses it. Adoption rate tells you whether your platform is actually solving problems people have.
