Platform teams exist to reduce cognitive load and improve delivery safety. Measure those outcomes, not how busy the platform team looks. ## Useful signals - Time from repository creation to first production-ready environment - Percentage of services on the paved road - Change failure rate for teams using golden paths versus bespoke setups - Mean time to recover when platform-owned components fail ## Vanity traps Ticket throughput and “number of tools owned” often rise while developer experience falls. Prefer customer outcome metrics and qualitative interviews with product teams. ## Publish SLOs Treat internal platform consumers like customers. Shared SLOs create accountability and make investment tradeoffs visible.