We have all seen the moment: the platform goes live, the launch deck looks sharp, the portal is polished, the golden paths are documented, and yet teams quietly continue doing things the old way. Not always because the platform is bad, but because adoption was assumed, not owned.

Drawing on my experience from travel technology at Booking.com, along with platform and architecture work across banking, healthcare, telecom, automotive, and government/defence domains, this talk looks at the adoption problem behind many platform engineering initiatives and internal developer platforms. Using real platform patterns, team behaviours, and lessons learned from both successful and struggling platforms, I’ll explore why “build it and they will come” rarely works, why platform decisions create long-lived operational memory, and how team type, ownership, contracts, and trust shape whether a platform becomes a multiplier or another system people work around.

The session will leave platform engineers and technology leaders with practical ways to spot adoption risks early, reduce friction before enforcing standards, and design platforms that teams can actually rely on in production.