Backstage Adoption: The Day 2 Problem

Deploying Backstage is an huge milestone for any engineering team. Whether you’ve set it up to improve service discoverability, streamline onboarding with templates, or enhance governance, the possibilities it unlocks are transformative. But here’s the hard truth: deploying Backstage is just the beginning. What comes next - the Day 2 experience - is where the real work begins.

Day 2 with Backstage is about moving beyond the initial setup and figuring out how to turn Backstage into a tool your developers use as part of their daily or weekly workflows, and in time, come to rely on. Many teams start with specific use cases like service discoverability or software governance, but these don’t always translate neatly into widespread adoption. That’s because solving a single pain point doesn’t necessarily create long-term habits. To make Backstage stick, you need a strategic approach that aligns its features with your developers’ daily workflows. So, let’s explore why Backstage adoption often stalls, and how to set your organization up for sustained success.

Build it and they will might come

It’s easy to assume that once Backstage is deployed, adoption will naturally follow. After all, it solves critical pain points: creating a unified service catalog, automating repetitive tasks with templates, and introducing governance tools to improve software quality. But in practice, adoption requires much more than simply solving these problems. It requires building habits, demonstrating value, and integrating Backstage into the fabric of your engineering culture.

Strategy: treat Backstage like a product

The key to overcoming adoption challenges is to treat Backstage like a product, not just a one-off project. This mindset is at the heart of successful adoption and ensures that Backstage evolves over time to meet the needs of its users. Treating it as a product means committing to continuous improvement, guided by user feedback and measurable outcomes. That does mean that if you’re a platform engineer, you may need to put on a product manager hat, thinking strategically about what your users need, prioritizing features, and continuously communicating the value of Backstage to developers and leadership alike. This means balancing the technical work with a clear focus on solving problems and delivering value internally, which may represent a big change.

It needn’t be overwhelming though - start by engaging your most important internal users - your developers. Communicate with them to understand their workflows, pain points, and priorities. Backstage adoption is a collaborative effort, and the more involved your developers feel in shaping its direction, the more likely they are to embrace it. Use tangible metrics to track success, such as catalog completeness, daily active users, or ROI from key features like templates (engineering time saved for each template run, for instance). These metrics not only highlight areas for improvement but also help demonstrate value to leadership, ensuring sustained investment.

The ‘treat it like a product’ approach to a developer portal such as Backstage is really well articulated by Adam Rogal, who leads Developer Productivity and Platform at DoorDash. In the podcast episode “Bootstrapping a Developer Portal,” Rogal shares how his team built their developer portal, DevConsole, with a clear focus on delivering immediate value to their engineering customers. By engaging engineers early and iterating based on their feedback, the platform team ensured that DevConsole directly addressed real pain points. This approach not only drove higher adoption but also built trust with their internal users.

Rogal also underscores the importance of creating a community - not just of users but of contributors. By empowering teams to actively participate in shaping the portal, DoorDash fostered a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. This communal effort allowed the portal to evolve alongside the organization’s needs, ensuring its long-term relevance and success.

By adopting this product mindset and prioritizing user engagement, platform teams can transform Backstage into an indispensable tool that enhances productivity and aligns with organizational goals. The experience at DoorDash serves as a powerful example of how this approach can drive both adoption and satisfaction.

Tactics for sustaining adoption

While adopting a product mindset gives you the strategic foundation for long-term Backstage success, tactics offer some actionable focus areas on a day-to-day basis. Let’s explore some key tactics to help drive and sustain adoption.

Automate catalog completeness

A rich and accurate catalog is the foundation of Backstage, but manually maintaining it is time-consuming. The best approach is automation. By using integrations with GitHub or AWS, you can automatically populate the catalog with metadata from your repositories or clusters. In our experience, organizations with the highest levels of catalog completeness (90% or more) have all made extensive use of automations such as templates and scripts, and entity autodiscovery and ingestion to reduce the manual effort involved.

Leverage templates for early wins

Templates are one of the easiest ways to showcase the value of Backstage. They can automate repetitive tasks, like setting up a new microservice or creating a CI/CD pipeline, saving developers significant time and ensuring software governance and best practice is baked in. The ROI here is often immediate and measurable - reducing a process from months to minutes is something both developers and leadership can get behind.

Measure and communicate value

Metrics are your best friend when it comes to adoption. Track data like catalog completeness, template usage (and time saved), and daily active users to understand what’s working and what needs improvement. Share these metrics with leadership to demonstrate the impact of Backstage and justify further investment.

Make adoption a cultural effort

Adoption isn’t just a technical challenge - it’s a cultural one. Evangelism plays a crucial role here. Host “lunch and learns,” demos, or office hours to show developers how Backstage can make their lives easier. Engage other engineering teams and create internal champions who can advocate for the platform within those teams. Adoption grows when developers see Backstage as part of their workflow, not an extra step.

Invest in custom plugins

While Backstage’s open-source plugins are a great starting point, one of Backstage’s biggest selling points is its near limitless extensibility through custom plugins. These plugins can address your organization’s unique workflows and challenges, creating a toolset that developers can’t find elsewhere.

Plan for Day 2 from Day 1

The real value of Backstage lies not in its deployment but in its adoption. To unlock this value, you need to approach Backstage as a product - gathering feedback, iterating on features, and aligning its capabilities with your organization’s goals. Adoption doesn’t happen overnight, but with a strategic mindset and sustained effort, Backstage can become an indispensable tool for your engineering teams.

So, as you set up Backstage, don’t just think about the first deployment. Think about what comes next - the Day 2 experience. Plan for it, invest in it, and you’ll set your organization up for long-term success.