Reducing Cognitive Overload Through Platform Engineering

As organizations grow and evolve, they often adopt a wide range of tools and platforms to support their operations. However, this can create a problem of cognitive overload, where developers struggle to keep track of all the different systems, tools and applications they need to use daily. This can lead to decreased productivity, increases in stress and time to value. Vodafone is on a mission to transition from a Telco into a TechCo, hiring 7000 software engineers by 2025. In this talk, we will explore the journey into Platform Engineering that Vodafone UK has taken over the past 6-7 years. How they have scaled to enable hundreds of developers locally and now how they have built a platform to enable thousands of developers globally. We will explore some real-world examples and the challenges of successful platform engineering, and the impact it has had on reducing cognitive overload.