Building paved roads that pay off

Vilas Veeraraghavan explores how platform teams can build paved roads that genuinely pay off rather than quietly accumulating cost and friction.

Using real-world platform and DevEx examples from past experiences at Netflix, Walmart, and other modern enterprises, the session breaks paved roads down into cost components, including engineering effort, operational overhead, loss of flexibility, and long-term maintenance burden. It then maps those costs to practical design choices platform teams control.

Attendees will learn:
• How to calculate the true cost of a paved road beyond infrastructure and tooling
• Why adoption alone is a weak success signal
• How to design paved roads that feel optional but become the default
• When a paved road should stay narrow, be time-boxed, or not exist at all
• Practical heuristics for deciding what the platform owns versus what teams own

The talk emphasizes actionable guidance over theory, helping platform teams build fewer, sharper paved roads that developers trust and organizations can justify.