How do I convince teams to use the paved road without a mandate?

Make the paved road obviously faster. Ship templates that get a service to staging in hours, not days. Publish side-by-side metrics (lead time, build minutes). Add nice-to-haves (auto dashboards, default alerts) that teams don’t want to rebuild. Keep the door open for exceptions via RFCs—but make the paved road the path of least resistance.

Is Backstage required for a just‑enough platform?

No. It helps at scale, but repo templates plus good docs are enough to start. We typically add Backstage once you hit 50–100 services and need a catalog, scorecards, and scaffolding UX.

What about multi-cloud or hybrid?

Treat each runtime as a product. If you truly must be multi-cloud, keep the paved road consistent (CI, policy, observability) and swap the deploy adapter (EKS vs. GKE vs. AKS). Don’t chase lowest common denominator abstractions early; they slow everyone down.

How do we keep security on side without gatekeeping?

Move controls left with policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest), SBOMs, and required checks. Give security visibility in PRs and GitOps repos. Reserve manual approvals for sensitive changes (e.g., PCI boundary), not routine deploys.

Platform-productivity · Oct 4, 2025 · 9 minute read

The Platform That Did Less and Shipped More: A Just‑Enough Paved Road for Unblocking Product Teams

Stop empire-building. Give teams a boring, reliable paved road with sane defaults, guardrails, and zero tickets. That’s the “just‑enough platform” that actually moves the needle.

Alex Kim

Principal, Platform & SRE, GitPlumbers

20 years building and fixing platforms at scale. Ex-Stripe, ex-Atlassian, once shipped a monolith that refused to die. Helps teams adopt paved roads, not platform empires.

Do the boring thing, repeatably. Your teams will thank you.

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The Platform That Did Less and Shipped More: A Just‑Enough Paved Road for Unblocking Product Teams

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist