Platform Engineering Without the Ticket Factory

Platform engineering is supposed to increase autonomy. So why do so many platform teams end up running a backlog full of tickets? New environments IAM permissions CI/CD tweaks Database provisioning Kubernetes changes Developers open tickets Platform prioritizes Platform reviews Platform implements Platform deploys Everyone calls this "platform engineering." It isn't. It's a ticket factory. And the more optimized your ticket factory becomes, the further you drift from what platform engineering was meant to solve. How We Got Here The "internal customer" narrative didn't come from nowhere. It came from good intentions: Breaking Dev vs Ops silos Treating developers with a product mindset Improving developer experience Reducing friction Making infrastructure reusable Platform-as-a-product made sense. Developers became "customers." Platform teams became "service providers." But somewhere along the way, enablement quietly turned into centralization. When every infrastructure change flows thro