You can spend months building a slick, scalable platform. But if developers are still blocked waiting for tickets, if onboarding still takes weeks, if releases still feel risky, what did you really gain? A platform is a means, not an end. It only matters if it enables better outcomes.
By Jared Bowns
Jun 17, 2025
When engineering leaders talk about investing in DevOps or building internal developer platforms, the conversation often starts with tools, frameworks, and automation. And sure, those things matter.
But here’s the catch:
It’s easy to think the goal is technical in nature (e.g., building a platform), when the real value comes from the leverage it creates.
Let’s unpack that.
🚧 Not Every Platform Creates Leverage
You can spend months building a slick, scalable platform. But if developers are still blocked waiting for tickets, if onboarding still takes weeks, if releases still feel risky, what did you really gain?
A platform is a means, not an end. It only matters if it enables better outcomes.
Good platforms, and good DevOps practices, create leverage:
⚡ Faster onboarding → new engineers ship code in days, not weeks
🧑💻 Self-service infrastructure → developers unblock themselves without waiting on ops
🛡️ Automated quality gates → confidence in every commit, fewer rollbacks
📦 Unified pipelines → consistent, auditable delivery across teams
This is the difference between a platform that adds overhead and one that multiplies output.
📊 Leverage Is the New ROI
Traditional DevOps metrics like deploy frequency, lead time, and MTTR are valuable, but they’re not the whole story.
The real question is:
“How much leverage are we creating?”
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Without Leverage | With Leverage |
|---|---|
Engineers wait days for test environments | Engineers self-serve sandboxed environments in minutes |
Onboarding takes 3+ weeks | Onboarding takes 2 days with prebuilt pipelines & tooling |
Dev teams rely on ops to deploy | Dev teams ship independently with confidence |
Releases are infrequent and risky | Releases are continuous and reversible |
These aren’t just technical wins. They’re business wins:
✅ Faster time to market
✅ Increased feature velocity
✅ Lower incident volume
✅ Higher developer satisfaction
✅ Better retention and recruitment
That’s ROI you can take to the boardroom.
🧠 Building for Leverage, Not Elegance
The mistake many platform teams make is chasing technical elegance at the expense of usability and adoption.
The goal isn’t to impress other engineers, it’s to enable them.
So the next time you’re evaluating a DevOps initiative, ask:
Who does this unblock?
How many steps does it remove?
What recurring pain does it eliminate?
Can we measure the impact in terms of time saved, velocity gained, or risk reduced?
Because building a platform is easy.
Building leverage? That’s where the real strategy is.
🔚 Final Thought
🛠️ Great DevOps isn't about the tools you build.
⚙️ It's about the possibilities you unlock.
Let’s stop building for internal elegance, and start building for external impact.
