The platform usage trap part 1: Why high activity doesn’t necessarily mean high value

For any organization that has invested in an internal developer platform, a question inevitably arises: Is it actually working? Simply tracking adoption rates won't tell you if your platform is truly delivering value to your developers. This was the challenge faced by John Lewis, a major UK retailer. In our previous articles (parts 1 and 2 ) we introduced the John Lewis Digital Platform (JLDP) and how it enabled dozens of product teams to build high-quality software rapidly to power www.johnlewis.com and other critical applications. But how did they know that the platform was actually successful? Traditional product metrics like revenue and sales don’t translate easily to this world. When you focus only on whether your tenants use the platform, you don’t understand whether it’s bringing them value. In this article, Alex Moss from the John Lewis platform team discusses how they moved beyond simple usage metrics to develop a sophisticated, multi-stage approach to measuring the real value