Thinking in Platforms
Platform engineering as the operating model for work in the AI era.
By Kaspar von Grünberg and Luca Galante. From the co-creator of the term "Internal Developer Platform" and the host of PlatformCon.
About the Book
The operating model for the modern enterprise
Leading organizations think in platforms. They understand what most still miss: work can be designed, operated, and improved as a production system.
They do not leave recurring work to scattered tools, informal coordination, meetings, tickets, and heroic individuals. They design the system around knowledge work, turning repeated intent into reliable outcomes at scale.
This is the promise of platform engineering.
Thinking in Platforms shows how a practice born in software development becomes a broader discipline for redesigning work itself. AI accelerates this shift. Humans and agents cannot operate reliably inside fragmented systems. They need clear interfaces and reusable capabilities, shaped in a repeatable manner as paths.
For leaders, builders, and operators, this book offers a conceptual model and practical playbook for redesigning how modern organizations work. It applies to the fields of software, marketing, sales, finance, legal, or any other form of knowledge work. The next productivity wave belongs to organizations that think in platforms.
PART 1
How to Think in Platforms
Production systems, misconceptions that block platform thinking, and the value vectors where structural improvement compounds over time.
PART 2
A Conceptual Model of Platforms
The Paths to Outcome model paths, capabilities, interfaces, identity, policy, and state. Applied across software, marketing, and healthcare.
PART 3
The Platform Engineering Playbook
MVP Program → Production Readiness Program → Platform Scaling Program. The 3×3 method, onboarding loop, ROI calculation, and roadmap design.
Inside the Book
Get the concepts, the frameworks and a step-by-step playbook
Thinking in Platforms delivers a full range of concepts and frameworks, plus the complete platform engineering playbook. It helps platform leaders diagnose where they stand today, introduces the Paths to Outcome model, and walks them step by step through building a Minimum Viable Platform and scaling it all the way to enterprise grade.
The Authors
The people behind the research
Kaspar von Grünberg
CEO, Weave Intelligence
An early pioneer of the platform engineering discipline and author of the book Thinking in Platform. Over the past decade he has designed reference architectures, built platforms hands-on with hundreds of enterprise leaders, and supported platform initiatives at some of the largest organizations in the world. As a technical founder, he has founded several companies in the field and built products like the platform orchestrator that powers large-scale Internal Developer Platforms across industry verticals. He is one of the few in the field who has built at scale and written the theory to explain it.
Luca Galante
Managing Director & Lead Analyst, Weave intelligence
An analyst and community leader in platform engineering. As managing director at Weave Intelligence, the leading analyst firm in the field, he benchmarks how the discipline is practiced across hundreds of enterprise organizations. He is the co-author of Thinking in Platforms, hosts PlatformCon, the largest annual platform engineering conference, and writes Platform Weekly, read by more than 100,000 platform engineers every Friday. He has chronicled the discipline as much as he has shaped the community around it.
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AI amplifies what you have — it doesn't turn a failing system into a winning one. Organizations only unlock real productivity gains when AI runs on top of clear interfaces, clean data, documented workflows, and deterministic systems. The platform is the prerequisite.
— From the preface of Thinking in Platforms
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