What does “continuous value flow through platform engineering” actually mean? In this Zühlke Commerce Talk, I sat down with my colleague Dennis Kolmitz, Engagement Manager at Zühlke responsible for our commerce customers, to discuss exactly that. We explored why platform engineering is becoming essential for commerce organizations that want to innovate faster, reduce friction, and keep their best talent.
From Projects to Products#
The concept of continuous value flow comes from a fundamental shift: moving away from projects toward products. Projects have a start date and an end date. But products, especially in retail, need continuous updates. Your customers expect the app to get better, more secure, and more feature-rich over time. That requires continuity.
When organizations operate in project mode, they plan a mobile app or an online shop, build it, and then it just sits there. A gap emerges until the next project starts. Teams get reassigned or even let go. Knowledge is lost. But when you treat it as a product, you establish a value stream that you fund continuously. The product keeps evolving, and the team stays intact.
What Is Platform Engineering?#
Platform engineering is a discipline that has emerged because DevOps put an enormous cognitive load on development teams. When teams started doing DevOps, they suddenly had to handle operations, logging, monitoring, and much more on top of building features. That overload is where platform engineering comes in.
A platform engineering team builds a platform that offers self-service capabilities to development teams. Need a CI/CD pipeline? The platform team provides it. Need authentication? It is available as a service. The development teams can focus on building business features instead of reinventing infrastructure.
Platform engineering is not about building a small internal tool. It is a strategic decision, usually made at the executive level, to create an internal product whose customers are the development teams.
The Business Case#
Dennis brought a crucial perspective to the conversation: the business value. In commerce, the pressure is relentless. Everything needs to be faster, better, and cheaper. Margins are tight. The tension between IT and business is real, and platform engineering can help resolve it by enabling teams to deliver value faster.
When teams are enabled and empowered, the constant conflict between “the business wants more” and “IT cannot deliver fast enough” starts to dissolve. Everyone’s needs get addressed more effectively.
War for Talent#
Nobody wants to work with outdated technologies, outdated mindsets, outdated cultures, or outdated processes. When talent joins a company today, they ask whether the organization practices DevOps or platform engineering. They do not want to work in a project where everything follows the waterfall model, where there are silo organizations, where people throw things over the “wall of confusion,” and where teams work against each other instead of together. That is not an environment anyone wants.
Platform engineering creates the kind of modern working environment that attracts and retains talent, both on the technical and the business side.
Innovation Through Experimentation#
One of the most powerful benefits of a product-based approach with platform engineering is the ability to experiment. Management can say: “Let’s try something new.” They bring a new idea into an existing value stream, define leading indicators to test their hypothesis, bring it to market, and see if it resonates. If it does not, they simply stop. The value stream is already there, so there is no wasted infrastructure.
This ability to experiment drives innovation and gives both technical and business team members the freedom to bring creative ideas to life. As Dennis put it: when people can try things out, it is fulfilling, because they can contribute their own ideas.
The Mindset Shift: Whole System Thinking#
When organizations come to us with their challenges, they often say things like “make our pipeline faster” or “we need to speed up development.” You can do that, but you have to look at the whole picture. We call this whole system thinking. A value stream goes from idea to production, covering an entire product. If you only turn one dial, it might have a positive effect on that one component but a negative effect on another.
That is why we always start with a root cause analysis. What problem are we really solving? And why do we want to solve it? The most common driver we see is that teams can no longer focus on business features because they are overloaded with operational tasks, and that is where platform engineering becomes the solution.
Platform Engineering Is a Transformation#
An important insight from our discussion: platform engineering is essentially a transformation. Teams are transformed because certain responsibilities move to the platform team. A platform gets built, services get consumed by different teams, and the way of working fundamentally changes.
But here is the key point: it is not a transformation project with a start and end date. It is an internal product, an internal service. It will never end. It continuously evolves as new technologies emerge, including AI services that the platform team can provide, such as hosting large language models or providing APIs that other teams can use.
Key Takeaways#
- Shift from projects to products. Continuous value flow requires treating your software as a product with ongoing investment, not a project with a fixed end date.
- Platform engineering reduces cognitive load. By providing self-service capabilities, it frees development teams to focus on business features.
- It is a strategic investment. Platform engineering is not something you “just do.” It requires executive-level commitment and proper funding.
- The platform team builds an internal product. Think of it as product development for your own teams, with a product owner who constantly asks: “What do my internal customers need?”
- Whole system thinking is essential. Do not just optimize one part. Look at the entire value stream from idea to production.
- Experimentation drives innovation. A product-based approach makes it easy to test new ideas with low risk.
- Talent retention matters. Modern engineering practices create the environment that top talent expects.