The "Fruit Basket" problem: Rebuilding PayFit's platform trust & alignment

From 2019 to 2022, PayFit kept switching between a centralized platform team and SREs embedded in product teams, and also between monorepos and multi-repos.

Around 2023, trust reached its lowest point in the Scorecard era.

Embedding SREs was meant to bring DevOps culture, but their objectives often conflicted with product goals.

Deployment guidance was fragmented, with four or five different answers to the same deployment question, while half-finished 2021/2022 "ghost migrations" were still being maintained in 2024.

By late 2024, PayFit consolidated four or five platform-related teams into one Internal Developer Platform team with one roadmap and one source of truth; Gregor Hohpe contrasts a "fruit basket" with a "fruit salad".