Platform teams that measure themselves on tickets closed end up building an internal service desk. Platform teams that measure themselves on adoption end up building a product.

Signals worth tracking

• Time from an empty repository to a running service in production.
• The share of teams on the golden path versus the share that built their own.
• How often the platform is bypassed, and for what. Every bypass is a feature request written in behaviour.

Mandates are a smell

If teams have to be required to use the platform, the platform is not yet better than the alternative. That is uncomfortable but it is useful information, and it is more honest than a compliance metric. Fix the reason people are routing around it before you make routing around it against the rules.