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# 7 Ways to Fail at Building a Platform


- **Date:** Thursday, Jul 9, 2026
- **Time:** 10:10–10:40 (30 min)
- **Room:** Stage 12
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100015-7-ways-to-fail-at-building-a-platform)

## Description

Building your own internal developer platform can seem attractive, but it's a risky proposition. In a platform as a product approach, when you build it, you own it, and now you're in the business of developing a product instead of your actual business. In this talk, drawing from 10 years of platform engineering case studies of large organizations, Coté will go over seven risks of building your own platform: expansive scopes, underestimating cost, project mindsets, death by customization, skills, security and compliance, resume-driven development. You can learn from the many people who've suffered these risks already and, hopefully, avoid them yourself. 

## Speaker

### [Michael Coté](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@michael-cote)

Senior Member of Technical Staff at Tanzu


## Related talks at this congress

- [Stop Renaming Teams, Start Product Thinking: A PM's Guide to Platform-as-a-Product](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1033-stop-renaming-teams) — Dominik Schmidle
- [Why Developers Abandon Your Product in the First 10 Minutes (And How to Stop It)](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1231-why-developers) — Marcos Placona
- [Building on Open Source: The New Product Playbook](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1037-building-on-open) — Cédric Gégout, Dana Lawson, Michael "Monty" Widenius, Sebastian Kister, Ignacio Riesgo
- [Why Great Developers Stay Poor](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1106-why-great-developers) — Jawed Sahebjan