How DevOps Friction Turns into Real Products

In this IaCConf 2026 panel, three founders building tools that solve real DevOps and platform engineering friction discuss how AI changes the calculus on build vs. buy, what it takes to drive real platform adoption, and what they would design differently if starting from scratch today. Moderator Serena Chechile (former UX lead for developer tooling at JPMorgan Chase, where she supported more than 55,000 engineers) leads the conversation with Chris Evans (cofounder of Incident.io, the incident management and software reliability platform), Ganesh Datta (cofounder and CTO of Cortex, the engineering operations platform), and Vlad Matsiiako (cofounder and CEO of Infisical, the centralized platform for secrets and infrastructure security). The panel digs into how the cost of building software has effectively gone to zero, why maintenance and interoperability still matter, why platform teams need a product mindset to drive real adoption, and why every system being built today needs to be designed for agents as well as humans. They also tackle audience questions on team size, scalability, and when build vs. buy decisions become hard to reverse. Memorable takeaways: Most teams think they're a special snowflake. They usually aren't. Build the first 20%, then decide whether the depth is worth the maintenance. Agents are now the default end users of every platform you ship. Building doesn't drive adoption. Treat your platform like a product. This session is essential viewing for platform engineering leaders, founders, engineering executives, and anyone shaping internal tooling strategy. Watch every session on demand:    • IaCConf 2026   Learn more about the IaCConf community: https://iacconf.com Follow IaCConf on LinkedIn for community updates and announcements about IaCConf 2027:   / iac-conf