30-60-90-Day Plan: A Guide for New Heads of Platform Engineering

The term platform engineering emerged in the 2010s and has been widely used since 2018, but it’s still often confused with DevOps. They both aim to deliver business value more efficiently, but DevOps does so by combining software development and operations processes, whereas platform engineering pursues efficiency by structuring the technologies and systems involved more effectively. Think of DevOps as a culture and platform engineering as the technical automation foundation that supports the culture.

Businesses that produce technology products work in the same way as a factory that produces automobiles: Raw materials are processed on a production line to become finished goods for sale.

To improve efficiency, you need to understand the factory, its end goal, and the current bottleneck (there’s always just one), and then you deliberately optimize the bottleneck. Toyota’s just-in-time production system enables it to move raw materials when they’re needed, optimizing production and reducing costs. In essence, it’s identical to the Three Ways of DevOps.

Using the factory analogy, platform engineering is the optimization of the factory’s tools to enable staff to be more productive.

All technology companies do DevOps, to some extent, whether they acknowledge it or not. Platform engineering emerges as companies mature to a point where optimizing systems and tools can generate significant return on investment.

Successful platform engineering

The success of platform engineering depends on measuring its impact. With product engineering, you can lean on sales or product departments for support, but platform engineering works independently and will never generate business revenue directly. At best, you’ll be the catalyst propelling product teams to dizzying heights of success; at worst, you’ll close the business.

Planning is key to success; being deliberate and measured in your actions is your superpower.

Golden paths, guardrails, and autonomy all have their place, depending on your company’s maturity, regulatory environment, and culture. Your goal is to strike a balance between giving people sufficient freedom to be creative but not enough to be dangerous.

Platforms should be opinionated and not be dictated by the current ways of working. People only started complaining about CDs when digital downloads became available. The best platforms have a similar impact.

Congratulations! You’ve just been appointed head of platform engineering: Here’s what you should be focusing on for your first three months:

• Days 1-30: Internalizing company culture. Understand how teams collaborate, identify alignment (or misalignment) on the broader vision, and build relationships.
• Days 31-60: Mapping out the factory. Diagnose and address bottlenecks in workflows or strategy to deliver immediate value.
• Days 61-90: Building a proactive measurement system. Implement metrics and data collection strategies early to enable data-driven decisions and long-term planning.

Days 1 – 30: Internalizing company culture

Your first month is all about listening and observing. This is your opportunity to understand the company’s dynamics, build relationships, and uncover the unspoken rules of how things get done.

By engaging with stakeholders across every level from executives to engineers, you’ll gain insight into the company’s goals, cultural nuances, and pain points. This groundwork ensures that when you begin making recommendations, they are informed, empathetic, and aligned with the broader vision.

Focus areas:

• Speak to diverse stakeholders: executives, engineers, and product managers.
• Understand business goals, company culture, and existing challenges.
• Evaluate alignment: Is the vision cohesive across teams?

Action steps: Learn & assess

As you start your new role, you’ll be under pressure to act, but don’t confuse motion with progress: Take your time. 

Use your first 30 days to:

1. Understand the organization.
2. Review business and technical KPIs.
   • Imagine you’re looking for the bottleneck in a factory.
   • Use engineering metrics (DORA, etc.) to investigate where the bottleneck may lie.
   • Introduce engineering metrics immediately if your business doesn’t already use them. Adoption costs are typically very low, and the ROI is high.
3. Review the business and technical roadmap.
   • Focus on upcoming business goals.
   • Look out for misalignment or key risk areas. Key questions include:
     • Are current tooling choices rational?
     • Are your developers able to iterate quickly?
     • Do changes prompt excessive business risk?
4. Communicate with everyone.
   • Build rapport; it’s mutually beneficial for everyone to promote platform engineering.

Days 31 – 60: Mapping out the factory

Now that you understand your company at a foundational level, you need to focus on diagnosing operational and technical bottlenecks. Observation shifts to action, as you identify inefficiencies in workflows, platform strategies, and development pipelines.

By prioritizing issues based on impact and feasibility and validating ideas collaboratively, you’ll build momentum without disrupting team dynamics. Identifying these bottlenecks lays the groundwork for meaningful improvements and sets the stage for strategic planning.

Focus Areas:

• Assess workflow bottlenecks in platform strategy, DevOps processes, and development pipelines.
• Interpret and prioritize issues based on ROI and impact.

Action Steps: Map out the factory

You know enough about the company and its business goals not to be dangerous, you’ve found the key bottleneck, and you have probably discovered many others. This is typically the stage when decision paralysis kicks in or plans fail to address the bottleneck. Here’s how to avoid that happening:

1. Lay out your technical vision
   • Incoming CTOs typically create these documents to build organizational alignment, but this doesn’t have to be the CTO’s prerogative. Ground your document in the facts you’ve discovered but describe your ultimate ideal, making it compelling and relatable. Present the end state rather than a delivery plan because delivery plans are distracting and you want everyone to buy in to the vision.
   • You don’t need to be certain about the tools that should be used to realize your vision, but ensure there is tooling available that can deliver it. Otherwise, the vision will never be a reality.
   • Poor tool selection can ruin even the best plan, so if you have doubts, speak to colleagues, stakeholders, and vendors. Use feature comparison matrices to rationalize your decision-making.
   • Get as many peer reviews of your vision as possible. A collective vision is more powerful than a solitary one.
   • Ensure realistic cost and complexity levels for transitioning to the tools you choose.
   • Don’t be afraid to insist that measurement comes first. You can progress quite far as an organization without measuring your delivery efficiency. If you’ve joined such a company, you should still include measurement in your vision.
   • Buy vs build is almost always the better option. Build only if yours is a highly niche or extremely large company. Remember your business goals, and don’t expend effort that should be invested in furthering company KPIs. Keep your tech stack lean.
2.  Delivery plan
   • Be aware that not everyone will align with your vision. However, detractors will convert as your vision becomes reality. 
   • Although delivery plans vary widely, they should include the following:
     • KPIs referencing current vs expected outcomes for all deliverables 
     • Compelling ROI with low adoption cost/risk
     • First task — addressing the bottleneck 
     • Deliverables broken down for continuous feedback
     • Alignment with business objectives
     • Stated tools natively work cohesively with one another
     • Minimal parallel workstreams
     • Decoupled workstreams
     • Timeframe for delivery less than a year
     • Lean delivery 
3. Build team competency
   • Identify any skill gaps in the platform team.
   • Plan training or hiring to build technical expertise required for your vision.
   • Align personal development needs with delivery-plan needs, and seek win/win scenarios.
   • Work to create a self-organized team by empowering individuals to achieve vision deliverables.
4. Go execute:
   • Start with that bottleneck.
   • Build the rhythm.

Days 61 – 90: Building a proactive measurement system

The last phase focuses on forward thinking and laying the foundation for future success. Now is the time to think beyond immediate issues and start envisioning where you want to take the organization. Proactively instrument systems and processes to collect data that will answer the questions you can’t address yet.

By establishing metrics and enabling data-driven decision-making, you’ll reduce reliance on subjective opinions or goodwill. This phase is about setting up the organization to move strategically with clarity and confidence in the months and years ahead.

Focus Areas:

• Define clear metrics for platform performance (e.g., DORA metrics).
• Develop a cycle of experimentation, measurement, and optimization.

Action Steps: Optimize

1. Executing the plan doesn’t mean you stop measuring. In fact, measuring early and frequently will warn you early if expectations are not meeting reality, giving you time to reassess strategy.
2. Keep repeating your strategy, continue reminding people about it, and make them aware of how their day-to-day work fits into the bigger narrative. Platform engineering is hard and can take a long time. Discuss recent deliverables and insist on taking the time to evangelize the platform improvements in recent business deliverables — both for your stakeholders and for your team.
3. Use DevOps Three Ways to optimize your platform engineering, and, in turn, optimize your DevOps culture.

4. Stay aligned with changing business objectives. These can change quickly, so don’t be afraid to change plans to accommodate them. Platform engineering is a foundational principle, so if it’s not done correctly, everything built on it will be wrong too. Update your vision doc accordingly. It’s a living document and a reflection of current thinking.
5. If you’ve done all this, you should be feeling pretty satisfied. You can see a way forward, and progress is about taking incremental steps to realize it, measuring as you go. But remember the success you’re experiencing is not your own: Be humble, reward others before yourself, and change the culture.

Platform engineering is the foundation for organizational growth, requiring both technical and leadership excellence. Your 30-60-90 day plan should reflect that. You need to learn the company culture in your first month, diagnose technical and operational bottlenecks in your second, and establish metrics to enable data-driven decision-making in the third. 

As a foundational principle, platform engineering needs to be implemented correctly to avoid the failure of everything built on it. Don’t be afraid to continually update your vision document to reflect changing dynamics.