# Why Kafka Platforms Stall on People, Not Tech | Stephan Schiffner | Voices of the Kafka Community

[Voices of the Kafka Community](https://www.conduktor.io/voices-of-the-kafka-community)

The Bottleneck Is Not the Technology

SS

Guest
Stephan Schiffner
CTO, Steadforce

Host
[Ron Kapoor](https://www.conduktor.io/authors/ron-kapoor)
Technical Product Marketing, Conduktor

Stephan Schiffner is the CTO at Steadforce, a Munich-based tech consultancy working in platform engineering, data streaming, and AI. He has watched Kafka platforms get built across a lot of client environments, and the blocker that shows up after the first version ships is rarely the technology.

In this conversation

→Why Kafka is the basis of many platforms, but never a solution alone
→The real challenge after the first version ships: onboarding the business units
→How internal IT becomes the bottleneck for the platform's own customers
→The remedy: clear prioritization, good onboarding materials, and a genuinely self-service platform

"The internal IT is kind of a bottleneck, because they don't manage to build all the requirements that are coming from the business units."
Stephan Schiffner, CTO at Steadforce

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