What Happens When the Firefighting Stops?
What happens when platforms grow up?
When you’re building a platform, it feels like the early stages of Die Hard. Chaos everywhere. Systems breaking. People panicking. You’re John McClane - shoeless, under-resourced, but somehow holding it all together with duct tape, grit, and your wits.
But what happens when the terrorists are gone? When the dust settles? When you’re not putting out fires anymore?
What happens when your platform grows up?
Turns out, the answer is less about explosions and more about evolution.
From McClane to Argyle: You’re Still Critical, Just in the Background
In the beginning, the platform team is the cowboy. You’re bursting into rooms, stopping bad deploys, fending off chaos, and shouting “Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs…” through gritted teeth.
But once the platform matures, you’re not the visible hero anymore. You become infrastructure - like Argyle in the limo. Still important. Still necessary. But no longer in the spotlight. And that’s exactly where you should be.
Mature platforms shift from action heroes to invisible enablers. They let delivery teams move, scale, and build without needing to know how the magic happens behind the scenes.
You Stop Adding Features. You Start Managing Load
McClane didn’t win by getting more weapons. He won by using the vents, learning enemy patterns, and playing smart.
Likewise, mature platforms don’t need more tools - they need better traffic flow.
• Where are people struggling?
• What features are underused?
• Are you measuring friction points?
This is when platform as a product becomes real. You’re not sprinting toward a roadmap - you’re responding to signals. Listening to feedback. Monitoring adoption. You become a steward, not just a builder.
The Real Fight Is Against Drift, Not Terrorists
McClane had a clear enemy. Mature platforms don’t. Instead, the danger is subtler:
• “Shadow platforms” emerge as teams build their own tooling.
• Onboarding starts to drag.
• Your golden paths get rusty, out of date, or forgotten.
The villain now? Drift - organisational, technical, and cultural.
The only way to beat it is to stay proactive. Keep evangelising. Keep reducing friction. Keep reminding people why they should stick to the platform in the first place.
The Second Act: From Keeping the Building Standing to Opening New Wings
Remember the final scenes of Die Hard? McClane doesn’t just survive - he transforms. He becomes something more than the guy stuck in the tower.
A mature platform team does the same.
Once the basics are solved, you pivot to differentiation:
• Can your platform enable faster M&A integrations?
• Can you provide the backbone for AI capabilities?
• Are you helping the business launch products faster than the market?
If your platform isn’t creating strategic advantage, it might be operationally great… but strategically invisible.
You Won’t Get Applause - And That’s Okay
Nobody thanks McClane for every air duct he crawled through. Nobody claps for the platform team that avoided a major outage, enabled 30+ services to deploy seamlessly, and saved the company millions by standardising on infra tooling.
That’s the job.
Mature platforms succeed when no one notices them. When engineers stop talking about them - because everything just works. You’ve stopped being the fireman. You’ve become the fire escape: silent, reliable, and always ready.
Final Scene: Ho-Ho-Ho, Now I Have a Platform
When someone asks what happens when platforms mature, the real answer is:
They stop acting like the hero…and become the reason others can win.
Just like McClane, your early fight was about survival. But your legacy?
That’s about resilience, enablement, and quiet dominance.
Yippee-Ki-Yay, platform engineers.
