Internal Developer Platform  ·  View 03 of 21  ·  People and journeys

Actors and Their Core Journeys

Who the platform is for, in their own words, and what each of them gets to do with it.

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The people who ship product Product Engineer 900 of them Goal — Get my service running in production today, without learning the cloud account model or filing a ticket. Core journeys Create and ship a service ≤ 2 h to first deploy Add a database ≤ 12 min Release a change ≤ 25 min to prod Tech Lead 140 teams Goal — Know what my team owns, what it costs, and what is failing its controls — on one page. Core journeys Review what we own Clear template drift Argue for leaving the road On-Call Engineer 03:00, alone Goal — Understand a service I did not write, on a substrate I have never seen, before the page escalates. Core journeys Debug a paved-road service the leaky abstraction Roll back a release ≤ 5 min The people who own the platform Platform Engineer 12 of them Goal — Change something once and have it land across 1,400 components without breaking anyone's Friday. Core journeys Publish a golden path Drive a migration 1,400 components Answer a support request Security Engineer authors the controls Goal — Have a control apply to every running workload, including the ones that never touched a template. Core journeys Ship a binding guardrail Rule on an exception Report control coverage FinOps Analyst one per estate Goal — Attribute every pound of cloud spend to a team without a reconciliation spreadsheet. Core journeys Trace spend to an owner Reclaim idle resources Who this is not for End Customer never sees it Goal — Get a product that changes faster and breaks less, and never hear the word platform. Core journeys Benefits invisibly lead time · failure rate Landing Zone Team the platform's landlord Goal — Hand out subscriptions and network with a policy floor, and not be asked about anyone's Helm chart. Core journeys Issues subscriptions Sets the Azure Policy floor Internal Developer Platform — Actors and Their Core Journeys Person or role Journey / task External / third party Three engineer-facing personas, not one: the person creating a service, the person owning it a year later, and the person woken by it are rarely the same human. v 1.0 · owner Platform Architecture · date 2026-09

Why three engineer personas

  • The person who creates a component, the person who owns it a year later and the person woken by it at 03:00 are rarely the same human, and they want opposite things from an abstraction.
  • Designing only for the first produces a platform that is delightful on day one and hated in month nine.
  • The FinOps analyst is in the cast because attribution is a first-class requirement, not a reporting afterthought (ADR-11).

Assumptions

  • Twelve platform engineers serving nine hundred product engineers — a 1:75 ratio that decides what can be done by hand (stated assumption).
  • Teams own their components end to end, including production on-call.

Not an actor

  • The end customer, who benefits through lead time and change failure rate and never touches the platform.
  • The landing zone team, who appear as the platform's landlord rather than its user.
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Microsoft Azure · Platform Architecture · 2026-09 · 21 views · 16 architecture decision records03-actors-and-journeys