Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders

by Camille Fournier, Ian Nowland

Until recently, infrastructure was the backbone of organizations operating software they developed in-house. But now that cloud vendors run the computers, companies can finally bring the benefits of agile custom-centricity to their own developers. Adding product management to infrastructure organizations is now all the rage.

But how's that possible when infrastructure is still the operational layer of the company?

This practical book guides engineers, managers, product managers, and leaders through the shifts that modern platform-led organizations require. You'll learn what platform engineering is—and isn't—and what benefits and value it brings to developers and teams. You'll understand what it means to approach a platform as a product and learn some of the most common technical and managerial barriers to success.

With this book, you'

Cultivate a platform-as-product, developer-centric mindsetLearn what platform engineering teams are and are notStart the process of adopting platform engineering within your organizationDiscover what it takes to become a product manager for a platform teamUnderstand the challenges that emerge when you scale platformsAutomate processes and self-service infrastructure to speed development and improve developer experienceBuild out, hire, manage, and advocate for a platform team

Genres: Technology, Programming, Software, Computer Science, Leadership, Business, Engineering

322 pages, Paperback

Published November 12, 2024

About the author

For the 19thC gynaecologist, see Camille Fournier.

Camille Fournier is the former chief technology officer of Rent The Runway and former vice president of technology at Goldman Sachs.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love books written from hard learned experience. Fournier and Nowland provide the what, why, who, how, when and where of establishing the "platform as a product" not only from their experience but also from other experts in the field. It is no surprise that this has quite a few references to DevOps and Google SRE articles, Will Larson and Tanya Reilly's Staff Engineer books, Kelly Shortridge's Chaos Engineering, all of which are great reads on engineering management, and so is this one.

[Kiryll Kadyrka · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s good, but to me 90% was common sense and 10% with some parts in the beginning of the book and some excerpts later really valuable. Still, I must admit, for someone with no experience in forming or scaling teams, the book could be a trove of information. If you need a reasoning of why platform teams need to exist and how to create, manage, and deliver with one, the book will prove to be a great guide.

I’d recommend it with “Team Topologies”.

[Ahmad hosseini · Rating 4 out of 5]

You’ll learn what platform engineering is—and isn’t—and why it’s becoming essential.
Who This Book Is For? This book is focused on the technical, product, and people leaders in organizations that engineer and operate software platforms: senior engineers; architects; product, program, and engineering managers. this book is really for anyone interested in learning how to make platform engineering work beyond the technical implementation details.
Authors distill an enormous amount of actionable and nuanced advice into a well-organized and readable guide. Everyone who’s building systems at scale needs to read it.
Book examines platform engineering team structure and roles, and explains it with details. Authors explains about how to hire employees you required to build your platform team. In building a platform having product mindset is so important so they talk about product aspect of a platform and problems and challenges you may encounter with them. For example, in product management managing stockholders is one of the challenges you may encounter with that. Authors introduce and talk about power-interest grid to deal with this issue.
About technical aspect they talk about rearchitecting the old system you have and how to migrate to new version and whit kind of problems may happened and how you can handle them.
Some questions and parts of the book are answered/ written by famous people and based on their experience and knowledge. These parts are so useful and you can learn a lot from them.

[Abel Castillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of what platform engineering is at a high level, and an overview of the best thinking on the subject. A definite read for anyone whose job it is to provide tooling and support to a highly technical audience - even if they're not officially designated as a platform engineer!

[Erika RS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Platform Engineering by Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland provides a guide to designing, building, and operating internal platforms. The book blends technical depth with organizational strategy, offering practical insights for engineering leaders and platform teams.

I initially planned to skim a couple of chapters of this book to understand the difference between platform engineering and other models. I stayed because while this book is very technical and focused on how to do good platform engineering, it's also a high quality book on technical leadership, just what you would expect from Camille Fournier!

The authors show the evolution of platform engineering from Infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE, explaining why these models often fail to meet developer needs. Platform engineering focuses on reducing system complexity by curating a limited set of tools and abstractions, shifting away from custom integrations and one-off automation to scalable, opinionated infrastructure.

Teams should treat platforms as internal products with developers as customers. Successful platforms prioritize usability, provide paved paths for common workflows. They balance standardization with flexibility. They also note that not all systems should be centralized. Some amount of shadow platforms can be valuable, especially those at an early experimental stage.

The book goes over operational practices such as on-call management, observability, and monitoring. The authors argue that platform teams, not application teams, should own the operational burden of the platform. They encourage feedback loops via operational reviews, where engineering and management analyze trends, identify risks, and adjust priorities.

Migrations are a common platform engineering challenge and get a good amount of discussion. Rather than offloading migration work onto developers, platform teams should take on the bulk of this effort, leveraging APIs, automation, and gradual rollouts to minimize disruptions.

Beyond technology, Platform Engineering highlights stakeholder management as crucial for platform success. Platform teams must balance feature requests with business impact, navigate competing priorities, and maintain strong relationships across the organization.

To measure success, platform engineering teams should look at alignment with business needs, trust, complexity management, and adoption rather than raw usage metrics — especially when usage isn't optional. A platform succeeds when it enables developers to build and ship efficiently without unnecessary friction.

Overall, Platform Engineering blends engineering best practices with leadership guidance, making it valuable for platform teams as well as technical leaders in adjacent spaces such as application backends and developer tool companies. And if you lead a platform team, it's essential reading.

[Martynas · Rating 3 out of 5]

If one previously read books on engineering management, the majority topics and lessons will already be known. Overall a decent book, though more suited for someone starting out.