Theory on developer workflows
What do developers want from a platform?
Firstly it’s important to understand that a platform is not for everybody, but for 80% of your team. You won’t be able to convince every single person or cover every use case. Second, platforms impact developers to a lesser extent compared to the entire organization, for whom they have a tremendous impact. That’s why it’s vital to understand what devs (a.k.a. your customers) want from platforms:
- Easy to learn: The flow needs to be so fast and intuitive that devs get it instantly. Their willingness to invest much time is minimal.
- Uninterrupted workflows: Everything that changes daily habits is considered a distraction. Try not to force any break in the user interface.
- Autonomy and speed: Devs want to move fast and guardrails they can trust when they do go fast. They are ok with abstractions as long as you don’t remove context from them. They want to understand “how to leave a golden path” and go to lower-level configurations.
- Stuff they couldn’t do before: Win devs over with functionality they didn’t have before. Ephemeral environments are a good example.
Most frequent platform use cases for developers
Here are the most common platform use cases from a developer perspective, in descending order of priority:
- Daily activities related to deployments like deploy, debug, rollback, observe, apply minor changes to configs, and maybe work with preview Environments.
- Changing Workload architecture, adding or removing Resources, and applying profound changes to configs.
- Scaffolding new Workloads and creating new Environments.
Next steps
To see all of those developer use cases in action, check out our tutorials: