Motability Operations: Building a Modern Developer Platform with Roadie - Case Study

When Motability Operations (MO) began its internal developer portal journey in early 2024, it wasn’t just about adopting a new tool, it was about taking control of a sprawling and opaque software ecosystem.

Since then, MO has transformed how its engineers discover, manage, and standardize their services. Roadie’s hosted Backstage platform has become the backbone of that effort, with MO’s recent source code management (SCM) migration serving as both a milestone and a catalyst for deeper platform maturity.

We sat down with Jose Carlos (JC) Monteiro, Technical Principal, and Charles Illingworth, Engineering Manager, who lead MO’s Developer Experience (DevEx) team, to get the full story of their IDP journey, how they navigated an SCM migration as a chunky side quest, and some of the lessons learned along the way.

The Original Challenge: Visibility, Ownership, and Consistency

What was the impetus for MO considering an IDP? Prior to exploring the IDP space and ultimately adopting Roadie, MO underwent a major cloud migration from AWS London to Ireland and upgraded its OpenShift infrastructure in the process. These initiatives exposed a glaring problem: nobody had a reliable, up-to-date picture of what software the company ran, who owned it, or how it was configured.

As JC recalls: “We were trying to keep up with Excel spreadsheets. ‘What is this workload, who owns it, what is it for’, but it was always out of date. It was just too messy and too much work.”

Realising that they needed a solution, the team experimented with running open-source Backstage on their own infrastructure, but maintaining plugins and updates was error-prone and costly. It quickly became clear that self-hosting would pull the DevEx team away from delivering value to developers and into managing Backstage itself.

Other options like Atlassian Compass and Red Hat Developer Hub were briefly considered, but Roadie stood out as the only solution that let MO focus on building a great developer experience without having to run and maintain the platform themselves. Roadie’s fully-managed SaaS model removed operational overhead, while features like Tech Insights and the Scaffolder worked out of the box, with expert support when needed.

The Roadie Approach: Catalog + Scaffolder + Insights

The initial draw for MO was Roadie’s software catalog and Tech Insights, but the Scaffolder quickly became the workhorse of their developer platform. At first seen as a “nice to have,” it rapidly evolved into a core part of day-to-day workflows.

JC reflects: “We quickly realised there’s a lot of boilerplate work we were asking our engineers to do: CI/CD configuration, setting up repos. We thought, imagine if we had a simple UI where after filling a form, it does all the boilerplate.”

The Scaffolder has become so widely adopted within MO, that as Charles comments: “Even junior developers can create a new microservice without needing a more seasoned developer who knows how all the pipelines work.”

Today, MO estimates that around 90% of new services are created using Roadie templates. What used to take 2-3 days of manual setup now takes minutes. This has sped up delivery and reduced frustration, while embedding consistent patterns across teams.

An SCM Migration That Moved More Than Code

At around the same time MO was rolling out its internal developer portal with Roadie, the team faced a major technical challenge: migrating from one SCM provider to another. Their existing SCM had been in place for years and had served them well, but as their needs evolved, so did their requirements around automation, scalability, and developer experience.

“Our previous SCM had been reliable and had worked well,” JC explained. “But as our platform ambitions grew, we started running into some limitations. The new provider aligned better with the direction we were heading, both technically and in terms of the broader ecosystem.”

With the decision made, the migration itself was a significant lift. In spite of the scope - upwards of 20 teams and close on 500 repositories - it quickly became clear that the real challenge wasn’t the SCM switch in itself - it was everything around it. Once again the migration exposed inconsistent CI/CD pipelines, missing ownership metadata, and some fragmented standards across teams. What began as an infrastructure upgrade turned into a forcing function for broader platform maturity.

Rather than manage this manually, MO leaned heavily on Roadie and the Scaffolder in particular. Migration templates were designed to require proper metadata; every repo had to include a catalog-info.yaml file and define ownership before it could be migrated. This had a powerful side effect: it seeded the catalog with missing components and enforced consistency across services.

Teams were also able to self-serve their migrations on their own timeline, and those that didn’t need to be migrated could be archived, again, with a purpose-built Scaffolder template. Even MO’s shared Jenkins pipeline library was upgraded as part of the process, bringing improved functionality to teams that had previously been running older versions.

“Some teams were able to migrate 20-30 repos in a day,” Charles noted. “Doing that manually would have been weeks, if not a month of elapsed time, and even then, there’d be no guarantee the right standards had been applied.”

By embedding platform hygiene, ownership, and automation directly into the migration, MO emerged on the other side not just with a new SCM but with a cleaner, more visible, and more governable developer platform.

Results: Faster Delivery, Better Onboarding, Clearer Ownership

The combination of Roadie’s catalog, Scaffolder, and Tech Insights has delivered tangible benefits to JC, Charles, and the team at MO:

Speed: Creating new services now takes minutes instead of days.
Scale: 90% of new services use Roadie templates.
Consistency: Templates and Tech Insights enforce standards.
Ownership: Every repo had to declare its owner during migration.
Onboarding: New hires can quickly discover who owns what.

As JC observes: “It’s been very important not only for those of us who’ve been here a while, but also for helping onboard new people. They can quickly find information in Roadie - it was a nice surprise for them.”

Lessons Learned: Start with the Catalog

Looking back, JC and Charles agree on one thing: don’t skip ahead. While it’s tempting to jump straight into features like scorecards or scaffolder templates, those tools only work if the catalog is in good shape.

“Having to set up our services in Roadie forced us to answer some tough questions, even before the migration,” Charles recalled. ‘Who owns this? What does it do? Which system is it part of?’ We didn’t always have the answers.”

The software catalog is foundational. If it’s incomplete or inaccurate, downstream tools like Tech Insights and the Scaffolder may not deliver full value. Their advice to other teams? Prioritize building a strong, structured catalog first, standardizing ownership, adding missing components, and aligning on naming, before layering on automation and governance. As JC puts it: “I highly recommend that anyone new to Roadie spend the time up front refining the catalog. It makes everything else downstream more powerful.”

Looking Ahead

For MO, choosing a managed platform like Roadie both accelerated time-to-value and meant their platform team could focus on what really matters: building great tools for developers, not maintaining infrastructure.

Having successfully used Roadie to turn a daunting SCM migration into a springboard for a more standardized developer platform, MO is now planning a comprehensive data model review to scale and improve its catalog structure. The journey isn’t over, but the foundation is in place. MO now has the tools, structure, and visibility to keep evolving their platform with confidence.