Getting leadership buy-in

Summary

In this section, we'll be going over what leadership needs to hear to buy in to your pitch for a developer portal. We expect that you have a good idea of the problem that you want Backstage to solve at your company. If not, we recommend you start small. Look for something that is consistently frustrating developers you work with (this can include you). User interviews are a great way to better understand what needs to improve. It may be IT blocking the creation of new Github repos or databases. It might be 5 hours per week of manual toil that your whole organization has to do. It might be a slow time to production for new services or slow provisioning of test environments. Every company will be different. There is no one size fits all answer we can give you - and if we could, it wouldn't be well-tailored for your leadership team.

Milestones

Every Backstage adoption journey has well-known milestones.

1. You set up a PoC.
2. You get some users.
3. A group of users really gets the value in the portal and jumps on it. They may even create their own plugins - great!
4. You start to plateau with catalog adoption or daily active users.
5. Leadership starts to get nosy about continued value.
6. You hit a crossroads. Your team either starts to think about building something themselves or going for another off the shelf option or they sit down and do the work to get out of the plateau.
7. If your organization made it this far, you likely now have blocking checks for catalog entries and Backstage is a weekly if not daily portal for your developers - congrats!

Step 4 and 5 are painful moments. Successful Backstage adoptions can lose steam quickly. That's the nature of these things, the excitement will eventually run out and people will go back to their day jobs. Another YAML file or cataloging tool is just overhead and extra toil, regardless of the problem you're solving. Getting leadership on the same page about the value of Backstage is the first step to a very successful adoption story.

Recommendations

1. Bring something real to your leadership team. This can either be a true proof of concept or the demo site.
2. Define metrics around what you're looking to drive up/down. That may be time to onboarding a new engineer, time to production for a new service, time to mitigate incidents, etc. As we say above, this is the meaty problem that is unique to your company that solving will really move the needle.
3. Lower the barrier to adoption. Many people see yet another YAML file as overhead. If you have an existing cataloging solution, use that to simplify the onboarding process. If you don't, this might be a good opportunity to do that work.
4. Knowledge silos. Every team has preferences on how to do things. Centralizing that data into a single interface while letting teams continue to do things how they want to is a powerful goal and something that Backstage can make happen.