Platform Bottleneck Checklist
This checklist makes twenty-four statements about your path to production, grouped into six areas. You tick what is true today. What stays unticked is the list of things slowing your delivery down — and the basis for deciding whether a platform would fix any of it.
Direct download, no form, no email address. We learn that the file was fetched, not who fetched it.
Who it is for
For engineering leads, platform teams, and anyone who has to explain why releases take longer than they should. Work through it with two or three people who see the path to production from different sides: development, operations, and whoever answers for the budget.
How to use it
Only tick what is already true — not what is planned, requested, or described in a ticket. If the room disagrees about a statement, it counts as open: the disagreement is itself a finding. At the end you count the open items, not the ticked ones.
The checklist
Path to production
Environments and test data
Operations and on-call
Platform as a product
Cost and capacity
Knowledge and dependencies
Reading the result
Count the open items — everything you could not tick. How they cluster matters more than the total: four open items inside one area is a different problem from four spread across all six.
0 to 4 open
Isolated gaps. That is ordinary maintenance, not a platform question. Take the open items one at a time.
5 to 12 open
A visible bottleneck, usually concentrated in one or two areas. Worth finding the cause before buying tooling.
13 or more open
The bottleneck is structural. Individual fixes tend to evaporate here; the order you tackle them in decides the outcome.
What it does not do
The checklist measures nothing. It is no substitute for reading your delivery data or for looking inside clusters, pipelines and invoices. What it does is reorganise a conversation that usually starts with tooling, and point it at the path to production instead. Hard numbers need the data itself.
Relevant engineering services
Pipelines, self-service, observability and cloud costs are part of platform engineering consulting. Use the open items for your next technical decision. If you want support, discuss the context with us directly.
Open items you cannot shake?
Send us the areas where most of your boxes stayed empty. You get an assessment of whether this is a platform question or something else — including when you do not need us for it.