Platform Plays - Balancing Business Urgency with Platform Scale

Learn strategies for managing business demands while building scalable platform solutions in this 13-minute conference talk from PlatformCon 2025. Discover how to create structures and artifacts that help platform teams resist pressure from customer-facing teams to develop non-scalable solutions. Explore the importance of establishing guiding principles to decentralize decision-making, understand why refusing customizations is essential for platform integrity, and master techniques for building effective self-serve platforms. Gain insights from real-world lessons learned through iterating on just-in-time (JIT) platforms and managing multi-region services. Follow the development story of GitLab's "Runway" platform, examining its business impact and how platform 2.0 is being envisioned for future success, while learning practical approaches to balance urgent business needs with long-term platform scalability.