Platform Engineering Playbook: Golden Paths and DX Portals

Platform engineering scales delivery by offering paved roads—high-quality defaults that reduce cognitive load. The job is not to centralize every decision, but to curate good ones and make them obvious.

Golden paths

• Templates that encode best practices for services, data jobs, and frontends.
• Runtime contracts that spell out logging, metrics, health checks, and SLOs.
• DX portals that surface documentation, scorecards, and one-click scaffolds.

Operating model

• Measure: track lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, and developer NPS.
• Partner: embed with product teams to learn pain points first-hand.
• Iterate: ship small improvements weekly; avoid big bang platforms.

When done well, platforms make the right path the easy path—and teams move faster with fewer outages.