지속적인 발견으로 더 나은 플랫폼 구축

Every platform team has a war story about a tool they spent months building that ended up underused, misunderstood, or abandoned. Not because it was poorly engineered, but because it didn’t fit naturally into how product developers worked or because it solved a problem no one really had.

I’ve seen this happen more than once. It’s not about bad intentions or lack of technical rigor. It’s that discovery was skipped. Discovery means understanding how engineers actually work—their workflows, pain points, and the problems that genuinely slow them down—before building solutions. Without it, platform teams end up solving problems that seem important from the outside but don’t match the reality of daily development work. And when discovery is missing, platform work starts to drift from its real purpose, which is supposed to be empowering engineers to deploy working software faster and with confidence.

That’s why I’m excited about something we’ve been doing on the Platform Engineering team at Stack Overflow: a practice borrowed from product management called continuous discovery.

The term comes from product leader Teresa Torrestreat the platform as a product