If You Build It, You Must Sell It
Since platform adoption is ideally voluntary, you have to treat it like selling a commercial product. This makes many engineers uncomfortable — "selling" feels like it conflicts with engineering values of meritocracy. But consider the alternative: a genuinely better platform that nobody uses because nobody knows about it or understands its value. That is a failure of the platform team, not the developers.
The commercial equivalent of this function is Developer Relations (DevRel) — the practice of building relationships with developers, educating them about your product, and helping them succeed with it. Internal platforms need the same function, even if it's performed by the platform engineers themselves rather than a dedicated team.
Internal Marketing Tactics
1. The "Golden Path" Documentation
Don't just document API endpoints and configuration parameters. Create end-to-end tutorials that show a developer how to go from zero to a running production service using your platform, step by step. The goal is that a developer who has never used your platform before can follow the tutorial and succeed without filing a single support ticket. This is your most important marketing asset.
2. Demos and "Brown Bag" Sessions
Host informal lunch-and-learn sessions (brown bags) where you demonstrate new platform capabilities. The most effective format is a live "before and after" comparison: show the old way (filing tickets, waiting days, writing hundreds of lines of YAML) and then show the new way (one API call, five minutes, done). Make the value visceral and concrete.
3. Internal Case Studies
Find an Early Adopter team that had measurable success with your platform. Ask them to present their experience to the broader engineering organization — in their own words, without you scripting it. Engineers trust other engineers far more than they trust the platform team promoting its own product. A 10-minute talk from a peer saying "we cut our deployment time from 2 days to 20 minutes" is worth more than any amount of platform team marketing.
4. Branding and Identity
Give your platform a memorable internal name, a logo, and maybe even stickers. This sounds trivial, but it matters. A platform called "the internal deployment thing" has no identity. A platform called "Runway" or "Launchpad" with a consistent visual identity becomes something developers can feel ownership over and pride in using. Identity creates community.
5. Feedback Channels
Make it easy for developers to give feedback — a dedicated Slack channel, a short monthly survey, an open office hours session. Respond to feedback visibly and quickly. When a developer suggests an improvement and you implement it, call it out publicly: "Thanks to feedback from the payments team, we've added X." This demonstrates that the platform is responsive to its users, which builds trust and encourages more feedback.