Economic Leverage, Not ROI, Should Be Your Platform’s Scoreboard

Many platform teams believe they are delivering value because their tools make development faster. But faster is not always better. In fact, when direction is lacking, speed amplifies failure. This article proposes a shift from tracking ROI to measuring economic leverage.

1. Speed Alone Is Not Success

Platform teams often evaluate success through return on investment (ROI), delivery throughput, or developer satisfaction. These indicators are easy to measure but can lead to misleading conclusions. Acceleration, in itself, is not inherently valuable.

Speed without direction simply enables teams to fail faster.

The true risk lies in mistaking platform success for stakeholder failure.

Example: A platform capability reduces release time by 30 percent. However, if downstream teams use this gain to ship poorly scoped or invalidated features, the company sees no benefit. The platform succeeded technically, but failed economically.

2. Measure What Matters, Not Just What Moves

To measure true enablement, platforms should apply calibrated metrics that consider team readiness and outcome quality.

Enablement Rate
This metric tracks the percentage of platform usage instances where downstream teams had clearly defined, validated business cases.

Formula:
Enablement Rate = Validated Accelerations / Total Platform Usage

The key lies in counting only the cases where the team used the platform to deliver a scoped, bounded initiative with business alignment. Anything else reflects activity, not enablement.

Growth Enablement Rate
Some enablement work does not show immediate economic return, but improves a team's maturity. For instance, reducing incident frequency, introducing better deployment strategies, or increasing operational autonomy. These improvements build resilience and long-term effectiveness.

3. A New Scoreboard: The Economic Leverage Index

Even calibrated enablement remains local. To align platform work with company-wide impact, organisations need a single strategic anchor.

Economic Leverage Index (ELI)
This metric quantifies how much a platform reduces the cost, effort, or risk of generating business value. Unlike ROI, which often reflects internal efficiency, ELI expresses external economic contribution.

An ELI connects platform capabilities to a universal business goal. For example:

• Cost per successful customer order
• Time to first revenue event
• Cost per onboarded partner

These metrics reveal whether platform investments produce economic elasticity. In other words, does increasing platform capability result in disproportionate improvement to business performance?

A high ELI reflects strategic leverage. It shows that platform work enables profitable growth, not just acceleration.

4. Enabling with Discipline

Accurate measurement depends on clearly defined preconditions. Platform teams should only include usage instances in their metrics when the consuming team has met a minimum validation threshold. This establishes a shared contract of responsibility.

Time Calibration
Measurement should occur over a fixed and reasonable timeframe, such as two weeks. This avoids biased snapshots and allows comparison between use cases.

Shared Accountability
Platform teams provide acceleration. Product and business teams must define direction. Enablement happens only when both are aligned. Success, therefore, results from the multiplication of platform readiness and team discipline.

5. Using the Canvas to Drive Real Conversations

This canvas allows platform teams to shift from internal delivery metrics to value-aligned business contribution. It supports conversations with product, engineering, and finance leaders by framing enablement in economic terms.

Questions to explore include:

• Are we measuring acceleration or meaningful progress?
• What is the core economic unit our business optimises for?
• Do our enablement efforts influence that unit?
• How do we distinguish fast delivery from responsible progress?
• Which patterns in our platform work compound value over time?

Platform teams must go beyond velocity dashboards and delivery logs. The real scoreboard is how efficiently the organisation turns platform investments into business value. Economic Leverage Index offers a clearer, more honest reflection of that impact.