You built an internal developer platform. Eighteen months in, adoption is 30% and the rest of the estate has built its own tooling. What went wrong and what do you do?
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What the interviewer is testing
Whether you treat a platform as a product with users who can decline, or as infrastructure that ought to be used.
The likely causes
Adoption stalls almost never because teams are unaware. The real reasons, in rough order of frequency:
It is slower than what they have. If deploying through the platform takes longer than the script a team already wrote, no amount of strategic alignment overcomes that.
It does not cover their case. The platform handles the standard stateless HTTP service; the team has a GPU workload, a stateful consumer or a legacy integration, and the platform blocks rather than bends.
Migration cost exceeds perceived benefit. The team's existing setup works. Moving costs three sprints and delivers no user-visible value.
It is not trusted. An early outage, a breaking change with no notice, or a support response measured in weeks. Trust is expensive to rebuild.
It hides too much. When something breaks the team cannot debug it and must wait for the platform team, which is intolerable for a service they are on call for.
What to do
Interview the teams that declined. Not a survey — actual conversations. This is product discovery and it is the step that is skipped.
Fix the top gap and measure. Adoption is the metric; treat non-adoption as a defect report.
Make the path fastest, not mandatory. If it is genuinely the easiest route, mandate becomes unnecessary.
Resist the escalation to mandate, which produces compliance without engagement: teams adopt the minimum surface, the number rises, the value does not.
What a strong answer adds
Segmenting the metric: new services adopting is easy and says little; existing services migrating is the hard signal; teams that adopted and then left is the most urgent signal and the one nobody tracks.
And offering migration as a service — the platform team does the first few migrations itself, which both removes the cost objection and teaches the platform team what is actually hard.
Common weak answers
Executive mandate. More documentation and internal marketing, when the problem is capability.