Explore critical anti-patterns that platform team leaders commonly encounter and discover practical strategies to avoid them in this 25-minute conference talk from PlatformCon 2025. Learn about five major mistakes that can derail platform engineering initiatives: neglecting hands-on coding responsibilities, failing to support critical systems adequately, skipping essential customer and market research for new projects, prematurely building version 2 systems instead of iteratively improving existing solutions, and inadequately communicating strategy, progress, and impact to both customers and stakeholders. Gain insights from real-world experiences and actionable guidance to help your platform team navigate these common pitfalls and build more effective, sustainable platform engineering practices.