Building Internal Developer Platforms That Teams Actually Want to Use

Sarah Chen from Spotify joins us to discuss how they built Backstage, the open-source developer portal that now used by hundreds of companies worldwide. We dive deep into the lessons learned about creating developer experiences that teams actually want to use.

What We Cover

• The origin story of Backstage at Spotify and why they decided to open source it
• Common pitfalls when building internal developer platforms
• How to measure developer experience and platform adoption
• The golden path approach to developer productivity
• Building a plugin ecosystem that scales

Key Takeaways

One of the most important insights Sarah shared was about the importance of treating your internal developers as customers. If you build it, they will not necessarily come, she explains. You need to understand their pain points, iterate based on feedback, and make adoption as frictionless as possible.

The best platform teams I have seen are the ones that spend 50% of their time talking to developers and understanding their workflows before writing any code.