Building Real-World Platforms: Insights from Abby Bangser and Cory O’Daniel

In a recent episode of the Platform Engineering Podcast, Abby Bangser, Founding Principal Engineer at Syntasso, sat down with Cory O’Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, and delved into the nuances of building effective internal platforms. 

Drawing from real-world implementations, Abby explored how platform teams can strike the right balance between standardisation, flexibility, and service-oriented thinking.

A full transcript of the podcast can be found on the Massdriver website

Transitioning from External to Internal Platforms

As organisations scaled, Abby noted, many found that third-party platforms alone were no longer sufficient, particularly when unique business constraints, such as regulatory compliance, came into play. These demands pushed teams to consider building internal platforms that could better reflect the nuances of their domain.

She highlighted how internal platforms offered a way to embed domain-specific policies and workflows that simply weren’t feasible with off-the-shelf solutions. By owning more of the stack, teams could move faster, respond to audits more easily, and deliver higher-value capabilities tailored to their organisation.

Balancing Prescriptiveness and Flexibility

Abby emphasised that platforms thrived when they offered more than just one way to do things. Teams can build opinionated "paved paths" that make life easier for the majority of developers, while still allowing escape hatches or deeper integrations for advanced users.

This dual approach helped reduce cognitive load for most teams while preserving flexibility for power users. It also created a healthier relationship between the platform and product teams—developers didn’t feel boxed in, and platform engineers could focus on improving the most frequently used paths.

Embracing a Service-Oriented Mindset

A central theme in Abby’s thinking was treating platform components as both services and products. This mindset encouraged platform teams to focus on discoverability, uptime, feedback loops, and clear contracts, just like customer-facing product teams would.

She explained that this shift helped platform teams prioritise differently. Instead of obsessing over tech stacks or implementation details, the focus moved to the experience of consuming the platform. Teams began measuring success by adoption, developer satisfaction, and time to value.

Encouraging Inner Sourcing and Collaboration

Abby championed a more nuanced look at inner sourcing as a way to unlock innovation and share ownership across teams.

Many successful organisations use inner sourcing to empower anyone in the organisation to contribute features, improvements, or even entirely new components, which moves away from centralising all decision-making within a single platform team or group. However, not everyone wants to or can contribute in this way. So, platform teams need to remember to serve all their customers and continue to strive for product thinking. 

In addition, platforms should be mindful of how to enable lower-risk contributions, such as a plugin mode, which reduces the bottleneck of approvals from a centralised platform team without compromising the stability or effectiveness of the central platform.

She described how this multi-pronged inner sourcing approach led to platforms that were more aligned with actual user needs. Contributions from developers using the platform daily helped reduce blind spots and ensured that capabilities reflected real-world demands, not just platform team assumptions.

Kratix’s Open Core Model

Finally, Abby spoke about Syntasso’s approach to open core with Kratrix. By offering Kratix as an open-source platform building framework and layering enterprise features thoughtfully in Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE), the team ensures that developers can explore, test, and build on the core platform without being locked in or facing unnecessary hurdles.

She noted that this philosophy also aligned with Syntasso’s service-first approach; organisations could evaluate the value of the enterprise features naturally, as their platform maturity increased. It created a relationship rooted in trust and value, not just contracts.

For a deeper dive into these topics and more, listen to the full episode of the Platform Engineering Podcast featuring Abby Bangser.