I've spent twenty years building and scaling platforms across financial services technology. In that time I've seen internal developer platforms succeed and I've seen them fail. The technical differences between the successes and the failures are smaller than you'd expect. The organisational differences are enormous. The adoption problem nobody talks about Most IDP failures share a common characteristic: the platform team treated adoption as inevitable rather than earned. The assumption goes like this, if we build something genuinely better than what exists, developers will naturally migrate to it. This is rarely true. Developers are busy, sceptical of platform initiatives based on past experience, and rational about where they invest their time. The teams that get adoption right treat the platform as a product with a go-to-market problem. They identify a first team, make that team successful, and let word of mouth do the rest.…