An organisation builds a paved road and half the teams build their own infrastructure anyway. What does the adoption gap indicate?

What the gap indicates

The paved road is losing on a dimension its builders are not measuring. Teams are rational; when they can route around a platform they do so only if the alternative is better for them.

The usual dimensions:

1. Speed of onboarding. If getting started takes a day of reading and a ticket, and rolling their own takes an afternoon, teams roll their own. The paved road must be faster, not merely compliant.

2. Flexibility for a legitimate case. A workload with an unusual shape — specialised hardware, an unusual protocol, a different runtime — that the paved road cannot accommodate. If there is no supported variation point, the team leaves the road entirely rather than partially.

3. Reliability. If the platform has worse availability than what a team can build, the trade is rational.

4. Responsiveness. If a needed capability takes two quarters to be prioritised, teams build it themselves, and having built it they never return.

5. Loss of control during incidents. If a team cannot debug or mitigate a problem in the platform layer during their own incident, they will prefer something they can.

What to do

Find the dimension rather than mandating adoption. Talk to the teams that left, and treat the answer as product feedback rather than as non-compliance. Mandating a platform teams do not want produces compliance and resentment, and drives the workarounds underground where they are harder to see and support.

Then:

• Reduce time-to-first-success as the primary metric.
• Add explicit variation points so a legitimately different workload can stay on the road partially.
• Publish platform SLOs and meet them, so taking a dependency is an informed choice.
• Make migration the platform team's job, not a request that competes with the team's roadmap.
• Treat adoption as the success metric, not delivery — a capability nobody uses has not been delivered.

The governance connection

A paved road is what makes light-touch governance possible. Guardrails prevent the severe cases, the road makes the compliant path the fast path, and review is reserved for the significant few.

Weaken the road and governance must become heavier to compensate — which is slower for everyone and is usually how a light process turns into a queue.