How to Successfully Adopt Internal Developer Platforms

Introduction:

Over the years, companies have struggled with traditional, infrastructure-centric visions. They have now shifted their focus to Developer Experience (DevX). To improve the DevX companies have started to adopt Internal Developer Platforms (IDP). An IDP acts like a single touchpoint, that consolidates all the tools and technologies used by the company. This allows the teams to focus their attention on business functionality by leveraging the available templates and libraries, drastically accelerating development and improving efficiency while cutting down costs and the time to market.

However, implementing an IDP has a few pitfalls that companies must avoid to achieve faster and more efficient adoption. In this blog, we will talk about these pitfalls as well as ways in which a company can successfully adopt an IDP while avoiding these pitfalls.

Common Pitfalls in IDP Adoption:

Adopting an IDP is a management-level decision, but that is not the only criterion for a positive adoption. The successful implementation of the IDP is dependent on the developers. The following are the common pitfalls that a company should avoid:

1. Workflow Integration: There is a high chance that developers will reject the platform if it doesn’t integrate into their workflows. For example, if the running services view in the portal does not reflect the real state, developers will get confused.
2. Feature Overload: If the platform starts out with too many features creates complexity and onboarding challenges. A cluttered portal can overwhelm developers, leading to disengagement and dissatisfaction. It’s best to choose the MVP features that make developers’ lives easier.
3. Lack of Executive Sponsorship: Management support can make or break the IDP. Without strong executive support, the portal may be deprioritized, leading to low engagement and adoption.

Avoiding the Pitfalls:

A product mindset helps organizations drive engagement with the portal as well as avoid common adoption risk. This mindset involves understanding the organizational structure and constraints of the users and building an iterative, stepwise process to rollout the IDP

The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Map and Understand the Team Structure

Understanding the team structure improves the IDP rollout plan because it ensures that the portal is tailored to different teams’ specific needs and workflows within the organization.

Each team type has distinct responsibilities and requirements, making it crucial that the IDP has the correct tools and integrations. Every organization has various teams such as:

1. Stream-aligned Teams: These teams focus on specific business capabilities and align with end-to-end value streams, ensuring that development work directly supports business goals.
2. Enabling Teams: These teams provide critical capabilities like infrastructure support to assist stream-aligned teams, helping them overcome obstacles and streamline their workflows.
3. Complicated Subsystem Teams: These teams specialize in complex technical domains, such as data or AI, managing highly specialized and often intricate systems that require deep expertise.
4. Platform Teams: These teams offer shared internal tools and services designed to accelerate the work of stream-aligned teams, such as internal platforms, APIs, and development frameworks.

Step 2: Tailor The Rollout Strategy

By implementing the following steps organizations can successfully roll out the IDP:

1. Conduct Developer Interviews and Surveys: Gather insights into developers’ needs and pain points to prioritize features and improvements.
2. Select an Initial Focused Use Case: Start with a high-value use case, such as critical APIs for a key frontend application, to demonstrate the portal’s value.
3. Monitor Usage Data: Identify adoption obstacles early by analyzing usage data, which helps pinpoint issues like poor user experience rather than inherent low value.
4. Gather Feedback and Iterate: Use surveys and user testing to collect developer feedback and iterate rapidly based on their input.
5. Leverage Successful Teams as Champions: Encourage peer adoption by showcasing the success of initial teams and using their credibility to promote the portal.
6. Gradually Onboard More Developers and Tools: Expand the portal’s usage based on demand, allowing for organic growth and avoiding a rigid, one-size-fits-all timeline.

Adoption Paths and Immediate Benefits

The IDP implementation process has typically 5 stages of the maturity curve. These stages are:

Stage 1: Aggregate

The first stage involves collating and structuring the existing work, tools, and resources. This will help the developers gain visibility into the ongoing projects and the available assets. IDP can help in reducing redundancies and also optimize resource utilization.

Stage 2: Assess

After gathering all the data, this stage focuses on identifying areas that require improvement and operational needs. When these areas are highlighted, teams can prioritize their efforts as the focus of high-impact tasks

Stage 3: Prescribe

The ‘prescribe’ stage helps realize economies of scale as standardization is widely accepted across the organization. In this stage, the scorecards and compliance metrics come into play. With the help of these tools, processes can be standardized, and the adoption of best practices can be encouraged with gamified approaches.

Stage 4: Enable

Implementing templated and repeatable processes is the key at this stage. With these processes deployments are faster and more consistent, with less duplicated efforts and low incident rates. Creating new services and components can be developed faster and reliably.

Stage 5: Optimize

Continuous improvement is the focus of the final stage of the adoption of an IDP. With the accumulated data and the metrics, IDP can evolve and meet new requirements with efficiency. This ensures that the platform remains relevant and effective for driving developer productivity.

Understanding team structures, their goals, and their pain points helps to craft adoption strategies that personally cater to the organization. The IDP should have a range of capabilities but should also be easy to incorporate into the organization. Every organization can leverage the IDP to enhance their engineering quality, process standardization, improve efficiency, and visibility of engineering output.