You Gave Developers Tools. They Needed Workflows.

You don’t empower developers by handing them a toolbox. You empower them by showing them the path.

And yet, most internal platforms today are just that: a massive, scattered collection of tools. CI runners. Template generators. Secret managers. Terraform modules. Kubernetes clusters. Everything is technically there, but there’s no flow. No structure. No paved path.

And developers? They’re stuck asking in Slack how to deploy a service, copy-pasting scripts from five different teams, and reverse-engineering what the “standard” way of doing things is.

That’s not autonomy... that’s abandonment.

The Toolbox Fallacy

We’ve been led to believe that giving developers tools equals enabling them.

But here’s what really happens:

• Every team builds its own pipeline, with different quality gates, environments, and security standards.
• New devs take weeks to onboard because there’s no clear path to “Hello, World” in production.
• Ops and security teams lose sleep wondering what’s running, and how.

This is what I call the toolbox fallacy. The idea that just because tools are available, people will know how to use them the right way, consistently and securely.

Spoiler: they won’t. And that’s not their fault.

Workflows Are the Real Product

Platform Engineering is not about building infrastructure. It’s about designing developer workflows.

It’s not just what developers can do, it’s how they do it, and how repeatable, secure, and frictionless that process is.

That’s where paved paths (or golden paths) come in. They’re curated, opinionated workflows that guide developers from idea to production, with guardrails, not gates.

And the best part? Good workflows remove cognitive load. Developers don’t have to memorize every policy or tool nuance. They just follow the path and ship safely.

Tools That Enable Workflows

The shift from tools to workflows is happening, and some tools are leading the way:

• Backstage helps unify the developer portal and create discoverable, reusable templates.
• Scorecards and Port bring visibility into standards, maturity, and ownership.
• Humanitec, Harness, Qovery, and others are letting teams define deploy workflows as productized experiences.

But here’s the trick: the tool is not the point. The experience is.

A tool that requires developers to understand the platform’s internals in order to use it isn’t a platform... it’s a trap.

Platform Engineers = Workflow Designers

This is the mindset shift we need in Platform Engineering:

Stop thinking like infrastructure builders. Instead, start thinking like experience designers.

Yes, you still write Terraform and YAML and Helm charts. But your real job is to design the workflow: the path that developers walk through every day.

That means:

• Working with DX and product to understand developer pain.
• Building with defaults and conventions, not just configuration options.
• Observing usage and iterating on the paths, just like any good product.

Because your platform is a product. And developers are your users.

From Chaos to Flow

If your internal platform feels like a set of disconnected tools, it’s time to rethink it.

Think workflows. Think paved paths. Think products.

Because at the end of the day, developers don’t want options, they want clarity. They don’t want freedom from responsibility, they want freedom from friction.

Is your platform empowering developers, or just overwhelming them?

I’d love to hear from you: how is your team moving from tool chaos to workflow clarity?

Share your stories in comments.