Dave O'Connor, Himself
We've built a beautiful platform. It's got everything people need - it will improve utilisation, make reliability easy, and generally reduce headaches for all involved. It has wonderful documentation, and we've worked out the more obvious pitfalls and solved those problems for everyone once and for all.
So, why aren't people adopting it? We've done the hard part, so why is there so much resistance?
Turns out, no matter how beautiful a platform we build, our approach to adoption can be the difference between enthusiasm and resistance when it comes to people actually using it. The methods we imagine for driving adoption don't seem to work, and the buy-in we had seems to have evaporated.
What's next?
This talk will run through a set of pitfalls, thought processes, practices and war stories from the platform adoption mines across several companies of various sizes, and give practical advice on approaches and methods to try, if the front door seems to be jammed.
Dave O’Connor has been an SRE (or SRE-adjacent) since 2004, and has built and operated teams, services and organisations at Google, Elastic.co, Twilio, and as a freelancer.
His principal areas of interest are working with busy teams and organisations, care and maintenance of the business end of Reliability as a practice, and building high-functioning organisations who don't hate their lives. He is based in Dublin, Ireland.
author = {Dave O{\textquoteright}Connor},
title = {Tales from the Platform Adoption Mines},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}