Thinking in Platforms • Kasper von Grünberg & Luca Galante • GOTO 2026
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. #GOTOcon #GOTObookclub http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/453 Kaspar von Grünberg - Founder & CEO at Stealth & Author of "Thinking in Platforms" Luca Galante - Managing Director at Weave Intelligence & Co-Author of "Thinking in Platforms" RESOURCES Kaspar https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvgruenberg https://github.com/Kasparvongruenberg https://kasparvongruenberg.com Luca https://x.com/luca_cloud https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-galante https://platformengineering.org/authors/luca-galante Links @PlatformEngineering https://platformengineering.org https://youtu.be/hBxV3Cr0lXY https://youtu.be/aIWhbS6rv0k https://youtu.be/mRoWGqcBSzk DESCRIPTION Kaspar von Grünberg and Luca Galante — co-authors of the new book Thinking in Platforms and co-founders of Humanitec and the PlatformEngineering.org community — trace their field back to an origin story most engineers will recognize: a company held hostage by a single backend engineer who could threaten to walk unless he got a 3x raise. That "key person dependency" problem, they argue, is exactly what industrialization solved a century earlier when Henry Ford moved manufacturing from artisan workshops to standardized assembly lines — and it's the same move platform engineering makes for software: treating the internal setup as a product instead of something that "just happens" to a team. The book is structured in three parts — historical foundations, a "path-to-outcome" conceptual framework built around golden paths, and a hands-on playbook for going from a minimum viable platform to full enterprise adoption — because, as they note, most platform efforts don't fail on the technical side; they fail on the social side, in getting buy-in from developers, executives, and security teams alike. The conversation's sharpest point for engineers building with AI right now: agents make platforms non-optional, not less necessary. An AI agent dropped into an enterprise full of undocumented "tribal knowledge" fails for the same reason a new hire would — except at scale, and fast. Von Grünberg's analogy: it's like hiring a brilliant intern and sending them into an office where nobody speaks their language, then being surprised there's no output a week later. That means real infrastructure — context management, security, observability, governance — has to exist before agents can be productive, and the old rule of thumb that you needed 100+ developers to justify a platform team no longer applies when a single person can be running a thousand agents. The bigger claim: platform engineering is already spreading past IT into security, data, and eventually every knowledge-work function, becoming less a software discipline and more the operating model for AI-first organizations. TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 01:22 The journey into Platform Engineering 07:54 The parallel to Henry Ford 11:25 Inside the book: 3 parts, 1 practical guide 17:33 Why AI agents change everything 23:52 Platform Engineering is going beyond IT 32:08 Resources 32:35 Outro RECOMMENDED BOOKS Kaspar von Grünberg & Luca Galante • Thinking in Platforms • https://amzn.to/4ArbKRx Ajay Chankramath • The Platform Engineer's Handbook • https://amzn.to/4eCSibM Ajay Chankramath & Eamonn Ryan • Domain-Driven Platform Engineering • https://amzn.to/3TdiC3J Chankramath, Cheneweth, Oliver & Alvarez • Effective Platform Engineering • https://amzn.to/3OnxN8i Gregor Hohpe • Platform Strategy • https://amzn.to/4cxfYdb https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #PlatformEngineering #PlatformTeam #PlatformAsAService #DevOps #ControlPlanes #APIfirst #Backstage #SpotifyBackstage #SoftwareEngineering #TodayInTech #Programming #KasparVonGrünberg #LucaGalante #GOTO #BookClub CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech Sign up for updates and specials at https://gotopia.tech/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1