Successful Strategies for Backstage Adoption in Organizations

Driving adoption of Backstage—or any internal developer portal—in an organization usually hinges on organization-wide initiatives. These initiatives attempt to coordinate the adoption of specific parts of the product. But behavior-change initiatives can be tricky to navigate and succeed with.

This post outlines a variety of proven strategies for fostering Backstage adoption. The strategies you select should depend on your goals for Backstage and the current structure and realities inside your organization.

The strategies highlighted here are based on experiences from Roadie customers who’ve already implemented them successfully. Determining whether they’re the right fit for your context is down to you.

Defining Successful Backstage Adoption

First, lets consider what successful Backstage adoption looks like for your organization. How will you measure this success? Do you envision:

• Daily usage: 80% of engineers logging into Backstage each day?
• Catalog completeness: 90% of your software fully cataloged?
• Dependence: 90% of teams reporting Backstage as essential for their workflow?

Most likely you’ll have a combination of goals: Some teams may use scaffolder templates only occasionally, but this could save months of engineering time. Some might use Backstage solely for API documentation, which provides immense daily value on its own. And you may want to automate software maturity reporting with TechInsights so senior management has real-time insights into metrics like software security.

Each goal has intermediate milestones. For example:

1. Every team uses the scaffolder at least once per quarter.
2. 50% of new software is templated by the scaffolder.
3. 90% of new production software is templated by the scaffolder.

And each of these steps requires a distinct strategy to move forward. Broadly, these can be split into:

• Land and Expand: Start small, growing adoption progressively across teams.
• Expand and Land: Launch with widespread value, aiming for rapid, organization-wide onboarding.

Below, we’ll explore tactics within each approach. You don’t have to pick just one—mixing strategies can often yield the best results.

1. Land and Expand

This approach usually involves piloting Backstage with a few teams or a specific area of the organization before expanding it. It’s especially useful for organizations with a more varied and independant engineering culture, or one lacking top-down support.

Benefits of “Land and Expand”

• Learning and iteration: Working closely with a small group allows you to gather insights, refine processes, and tailor adoption strategies for a broader rollout.
• Inspire others: Early adopters create a model that other teams can learn from.
• Build organic momentum: Introducing Backstage “aha” moments, such as the scaffolder, can drive excitement and encourage others to adopt.

Proven Tactics for “Land and Expand”

The tactics that work best depend on your organization’s circumstances. Here are some approaches that have worked well in real-world applications:

1. Automate multi-step processes with Scaffolder templates

Start by streamlining time-consuming tasks. Even a handful of templates can deliver significant and measurable savings that are appreciated by both engineers and leadership.

Example: If you’re setting up a team to build a customer communications pipeline, a few clicks in Backstage can provision AWS dev/prod accounts, a secure VPC, a sample server with CI jobs, and internal docs, all in under 20 minutes.

2. Get content into the catalog early

Starting with an initial set of entities can provide immediate value and help teams see the utility of Backstage as a source of information.

Example: Import users and teams from an identity platform like Okta to build a visual map of team structures with minimal setup. Teams can instantly use Backstage to answer questions like “Who is the product manager for the Customer Success team?”

3. Promote API documentation as a go-to resource

Make Backstage the primary source for looking up API documentation by encouraging teams to add their APIs early. This can encourage wider catalog usage.

4. Develop custom plugins for organization-wide needs

Create your own custom plugins that address common pain points across the organization. This can create a compelling reason for users to engage with Backstage regularly.

Example: Lunar Bank built a plugin for RabbitMQ dead letter queues, which drove high initial usage and catalog engagement.

Expand and Land

This approach aims for rapid onboarding of multiple teams by delivering value across the entire organization. It generally requires top-down support or a dedicated platform team to do the initial heavy lifting.

Key Tactics for “Expand and Land”

Prerequisites - Tracking usage and integration

Having data on team-level adoption can help track progress in adoption in several key areas.

• Catalog: Adding repositories to the catalog can help measure catalog adoption and provide comparative progress data for teams. i.e. The Identity team has 30 repositories with CI pipelines and only 5 entities in the catalog. Roadie comes ready populated with repositories in your catalog, a graph of catalog completeness and ready made Scorecards to track it in Tech Insights.

• Scaffolder: Data on Scaffolder usage is available already in the database as standard, though you’ll have to extract it and analyse it.

• TechDocs and Plugins: Usage of various plugins can be assessed via tracking like Google Analytics which can easily be integrated into Backstage early on.

Roadie provides usage analytics like Catalog completeness out of the box to its customers as its such a common requirement to understand a portion of the ROI equation.

1. Set clear mandates

Organizational mandates can drive adoption effectively if they’re tied to broader goals, have backing from senior leadership and are checked up on at a regular cadence or certain date.

Example: “Each team must have its production services cataloged with a PagerDuty annotation by September 21st to facilitate incident impact mapping.”

2. Regular check-ins and visualizations

Regular team check-ins or public dashboards showing migration progress can improve prioritization and motivate teams. Twilio explained how they do this at the Autodesk Developer Productivity Summit.

3. Celebrate success

Highlight the progress of individual teams to foster collaboration and enthusiasm. Regular shout-outs for API additions or new scaffolder templates can build positive momentum.

4. Integrate Backstage into new hire onboarding

Familiarize new hires with Backstage from day one. Add onboarding docs to TechDocs, making Backstage the go-to place for engineers starting out.

5. Pre-populate the catalog

Consider using scripts or providers like the AWS provider to populate the catalog with essential data, reducing the manual workload.

Conclusion

There are many potential strategies to achieving your incremental Backstage adoption goals via organization wide initiatives. Planning what to try and at what point is not an easy choice. The ideas above are not an exhaustive list but hopefully can give you some fresh approaches in your own adoption journey.

Image by Dirk (Beeki®) Schumacher from Pixabay