Platform Engineering: A Closer Look

Architecting end-to-end workflows keeps the world’s largest equipment rental company focused on customers.

After argo helped United Rentals evolve its business strategy to further leverage the emergence of digital tools on job sites worldwide, our Design and Technology teams worked closely with the company’s internal and third-party developers to enable and accelerate these new user experiences. With such a diverse set of stakeholders working across a variety of products and platforms, a system for consistency and efficiency was crucial.

Platform engineering provides an excellent starting point for strengthening relationships across engineering organizations, and extending these new connection pathways allows developers to personalize a system to best meet their needs. By helping plan out flexible, configurable, and scalable systems for key enabling technologies — along with agile project management to help prioritize product timelines — argo helped United Rentals accelerate their timelines, improving customer satisfaction and revenue.

Important to keep in mind: Platform Engineering alone can be too engineering-centric if it isn’t combined with a more holistic view of the organization and product portfolio. We recommend a parallel or integrated set of systems and self-service tools to consistently apply a Design Language System (DLS) and pre-configured patterns and application components into a seamless DesignOps and DevOps fabric. This enforces visual and UX consistency across platforms, and enables faster innovation for a more client-centric engagement style.

Platform engineering shouldn’t simply be an engineering solution or a UX styling pattern — it’s a culture change in product innovation and governance with lasting effects. By building reliable workflows, product teams throughout the organization can independently interact and self-serve with the capabilities they need for exceptional User Experiences.