Platform Adoption
The proportion of eligible teams and workloads actually using the platform, treated as the platform's primary product metric.
Adoption is the metric that keeps a platform honest, because a platform is one of the few internal functions that can be fully built, technically excellent and used by nobody.
Measure it as coverage of eligible workloads, not as a count of registered users, and segment it: new services adopting is easy and says little, existing services migrating is the hard signal, and teams that adopted and then left is the signal worth acting on fastest.
When adoption stalls, the cause is almost never that teams are unaware. It is that the platform is slower, less capable or less trustworthy than what the team already has, or that migration cost exceeds perceived benefit. Mandates applied at this point produce compliance without engagement: teams adopt the minimum surface and route around the rest, and the adoption number rises while the value does not.
The productive response is to treat non-adoption as product feedback, interview the teams that declined, and fix the gap. Platform teams that run this loop reach voluntary adoption; the ones that escalate to mandate usually do not.