How To Create a Platform Engineering Communications Plan
Imagine that your platform engineering team has spent months developing an internal solution designed to reduce deployment times and eliminate configuration errors. But three months after rolling it out, adoption remains low.
For organizations facing this struggle, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that this is not a case of technical shortcomings. The bad news? What you’re likely witnessing is an ineffective communication strategy. Without clear communication, potential users can’t understand the value of a platform or how to use it.
With the help of a strategic communications strategy, you can bridge the gap between platform capability and business impact.
Preparing Impactful Launch Communications
When platform teams focus exclusively on technical excellence while neglecting a communication strategy, they create an invisible barrier between the platform’s capability and its business impact. Users can’t adopt what they don’t understand, and leadership won’t invest in what they can’t measure.
The most crucial moment that will determine your platform’s success is its initial launch. Regardless of how you choose to introduce your platform, the initial communications establish the foundation for adoption and engagement.
- Clearly define the problem the platform solves. To overcome engineers’ skepticism of new tools that may introduce complexity, your communication should clearly articulate how the platform simplifies their work. Highlight its ability to reduce cognitive load, minimize context switching, enhance access to documentation and accelerate development cycles. Present these advantages as concrete improvements to daily workflows, rather than abstract concepts. For example, quantify the benefit by showing how automated environment setup can save each developer five to seven hours weekly.
- Proactively identify and address areas of resistance. Engineers are often concerned that new platforms will disrupt their preferred tools or established workflows. Your communications should directly address these concerns by detailing integration capabilities, outlining clear migration paths and explaining the available support options. Being transparent about current limitations alongside your roadmap will build credibility and help manage expectations.
- Enlist platform advocates to spread your message. Tap into the influence of respected technical colleagues who have contributed to the platform’s development or were early adopters. Their endorsements are more impactful than any official messaging. Facilitate opportunities for these champions to demonstrate the platform’s capabilities through lightning talks, recorded demos or pair programming sessions. These peer-to-peer interactions allow potential users to observe practical applications firsthand and ask candid questions in a low-pressure environment.
Once you’ve launched the platform, you’ll need to continue communicating with users on an ongoing basis. Let’s explore the key communication channels that should be part of every platform engineering team’s strategy.
Ongoing Communication Channels
Documentation
Documentation is transformative for platform adoption. It dramatically reduces support overhead and accelerates user onboarding. Great documentation answers three questions concisely: What problem does your platform solve, what benefits can developers expect and where can they find more information?
Documentation should follow the user’s journey rather than system architecture and anticipate user questions rather than just documenting system capabilities. It should also include a straightforward “getting started” guide, a comprehensive knowledge base for different scenarios and regular updates that keep pace with platform changes.
Team Blog
Consider creating an internal blog for your platform engineering team where they can share ideas and solutions with the platform users. A dedicated blog serves as a vital channel for delivering detailed insights about your platform, complementing concise communications.
Use it for comprehensive technical analysis, valuable user insights and compelling success stories and use cases. Blog content can help users understand how to use your platform and the rationale behind key design decisions, transforming them into more effective users and potential advocates.
Health Dashboard
When users encounter platform issues, there is nothing more frustrating than silence. A health dashboard provides immediate visibility into known issues and their resolution status.
An effective dashboard is a cornerstone of your communication strategy. It builds trust by transparently acknowledging problems and how the team is addressing them. Prospective users often review these dashboards to evaluate how reliably you operate before committing to a platform. Most crucially, a health dashboard demonstrates your team’s commitment to transparency and accountability, qualities that foster long-term trust with your user community.
Remember that dashboards must be accurate and updated in real time to maintain credibility. A dashboard showing all green systems during a known outage will erode user trust. Similarly, reported problems should always include updates on the resolution.
Real-Time Messaging
Your team should maintain a presence wherever your users naturally collaborate, which often means real-time chat platforms like Slack. Chat builds relationships with users through accessibility and responsiveness, creating a community around your platform. Here are a few golden rules teams can follow to ensure they’re building a good relationship with their users:
- Respond to queries promptly. Chat moves quickly. Teams should respond to user questions within 30 to 60 minutes during business hours to maintain engagement. If users are chatting in real time about your product, your team should be part of the conversation.
- Present a consistent voice to users. Treat your organization’s messaging systems like a customer-facing support channel. Maintain a separate internal channel for engineers to openly debate and resolve conflicting viewpoints. This prevents public disagreements among engineers, which can erode credibility.
- Document solutions publicly. When an inquiry is closed, engineers should share the resolution in the channel. This practice captures valuable learnings so other users can benefit from the shared knowledge.
- Open support tickets for users. For simple questions, chat is perfect. However, teams should capture more complicated requests in issue management software. To enhance the user experience, ensure that engineers proactively create tickets for users, rather than directing them to “open a ticket.”
Taking a Holistic Approach to Communication
The most successful platform teams don’t just build great technology — they enable thoughtful conversations and collaboration with developers. Communication shouldn’t be an afterthought; it’s a strategic capability that determines whether months of engineering work will translate into measurable business impact.
Remember that in enterprise environments, how you communicate about your platform often matters as much as the platform itself. Invest in communication with the same care you invest in your technical infrastructure.
Clear communication drives adoption, adoption generates success stories and success stories fuel continued investment and improvement. Your platform becomes more than a tool — it becomes a catalyst for organizational change.
