Developer Experience is just the tip of the iceberg.

In Platform Engineering we talk an awful lot about developer experience. And only rarely (if ever) mention the operational experience of the platform.

First of all - it makes me happy that human experience of the IT personnel is finally in the spotlight. Because if you ask me - at the end of the day - our experience is the only thing that matters. Who cares about system quality or even profitability if the humans doing the work are unhappy?

But there's a growing feeling that disproportionate focus on specifically developer experience may be harmful. Yes, developer experience matters for building new stuff - and it's important! By building new stuff we're moving forward, creating more value, hopefully changing our world for the better. But the more stuff we build - the more stuff is out there for us to run, operate and support. And if we don't cater to the operators' experience proportionally - we'll get unhappy operators who get burnt out - and consequently - unstable systems that fail.

One good example of this lack of proportion is of course Backstage - the IDP building framework open sourced by Spotify. While providing a great foundation to create a more streamlined developer experience - it definitely wasn't designed with operations in mind. The way plugins are managed, the way the workflows are automated - everything feels like the lessons we've learned from operating software in the last couple of decades went unnoticed.

Yes, we've tried to address a lot of these shortcomings at StageCentral - Backstage for Platform teams and now that Backstage has become so popular - the community is finally addressing them too. And still - this is a very good example of how operational concerns come as an afterthought and usually too late. The very problem that the DevOps mindset was supposed to resolve.

So let this post be a reminder to every organization starting out on their Platform Engineering journey. DevEx is important - but it's only the tip of the iceberg - define the operational experience requirements first. Think of observability, performance management, reliability and security and how to make all of these easy and streamlined first. And then build a great Developer Experience on top of all these. Otherwise your DevEx will very soon become sour.

Eventually your happiest developer can only be as happy as your most miserable platform engineer.

So remember to cater to overall engineering experience and then you'll see your platform scale indefinitely.

happy scaling!