Paved Road Telemetry
Instrumenting the platform's own usage — where teams succeed, where they stall, where they leave — so its roadmap is driven by evidence.
Platform teams are unusually prone to building from intuition, because their users sit nearby and complain informally, which feels like data and is not representative. Telemetry on the platform itself replaces the loudest voice with the commonest experience.
Worth instrumenting: how long each step of the golden path takes; where onboarding is abandoned; which self-service requests fail and why; how often teams override a default and which default; which documentation pages are opened during incidents. The last is a strong signal — pages read at three in the morning identify exactly where the abstraction is not carrying its weight.
The results are usually uncomfortable and useful. The step everyone complains about is often not the slowest. A capability the team is proud of turns out to be used by two teams. A default that is overridden by eighty percent of services was the wrong default. None of that is visible from the inside, and all of it changes the roadmap.