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Ericsson’s DevX Revolution: How Backstage Transformed Developer Productivity 🚀
Ever feel like your developers are spending more time hunting for information than actually building awesome stuff? You’re not alone! Ericsson’s developer experience team tackled this exact challenge head-on, embarking on a journey that transformed their internal landscape and resulted in a staggering over 4,000 weekly visits to their Backstage portal by approximately 1260 engineers. This isn’t just about a shiny new tool; it’s a masterclass in cultivating a thriving developer ecosystem.
Let’s dive into how they navigated the pain points and emerged with a robust, scalable solution that’s making waves.
The “Why”: Unraveling the Developer Pain Points 😫
Before the “how,” it’s crucial to understand the “why.” Ericsson’s developers were grappling with a common set of frustrations:
- Information Overload: Excessive time spent searching for documentation, essential tools, and the right contacts.
- Cloud-Native Complexity: The ever-increasing intricacy of the cloud-native landscape added significant cognitive load.
- Impact on Efficiency: These challenges directly hindered developer productivity and overall efficiency.
The turning point came at CubeCon in 2022 and 2023, where the team discovered Backstage. This open-source platform for building developer portals resonated deeply, offering a tangible solution to their identified pain points.
The Six Pillars of Developer Experience Success 🏗️
Ericsson’s journey wasn’t accidental; it was guided by a structured approach built on six key pillars:
- Leadership Backing: Crucial for initial investment and ongoing support. Leadership actively facilitated the initiative, providing guidance and challenging the team to ensure genuine value delivery.
- Mindset Shift: Cultivating a “portal first” culture. The core objective is to encourage developers to both contribute content and actively consume it from the platform.
- Addressing Feedback: An “engineering first” approach. By aggregating multiple connected feedback points, they developed cohesive solutions that maximized value for developers.
- Continuous Contact: Maintaining ongoing communication is vital. This demonstrates progress, delivers on requests, and ensures the adoption of new features.
- Stopping the Old Value: Driving adoption by retiring outdated methods. It’s essential to gracefully transition developers away from legacy tools and processes, highlighting the superior value of the new approach.
- Quantifiable Value: Delivering demonstrably superior solutions. Ultimately, the goal is to provide tools and processes that are undeniably more valuable than existing alternatives, compelling developers to migrate.
A Journey Through Milestones and Key Learnings 📈
Ericsson’s progress with Backstage can be charted through key milestones, each offering invaluable lessons:
September 2023: The Humble Beginnings (Zero Visits) 🐣
- The initial pitch secured crucial leadership backing.
- The first iteration of the Backstage portal was launched, focusing on a software catalog and developer environment setup.
January 2024: Listening to the Developers (189 Visits) 👂
- UX techniques like focus groups, interviews, and surveys revealed developer
needs for:
- More resilient tools.
- Centralized and up-to-date documentation.
- Streamlined self-service processes.
The Power of Agility: Addressing Grassroots Feedback 🌳
A significant learning occurred when a developer advocate group highlighted the critical pain point of code searchability across numerous repositories. This led to a strategic pivot:
- Temporarily pausing roadmap items to address this unforecasted need. This act of responsiveness built immense trust and accelerated portal adoption.
- Lesson Learned: Roadmaps should be flexible, ideally with a 6-12 month vision to accommodate emerging use cases.
June 2024: The “Stop the Old Paths” Imperative (840 Visits) 🛤️
- The team realized that simply delivering features wasn’t enough; they needed to actively “stop the old paths.”
- By terminating outdated tools and redirecting users to the portal, adoption saw a significant surge.
- Leadership’s consistent question, “What are you stopping?” proved instrumental. Without this, developers faced ambiguity with multiple sources of truth, undermining the Internal Developer Platform’s (IDP) purpose.
- Remarkable Impact: They retired a tool used by approximately 800 developers, leading to surprisingly positive adoption statistics.
Connecting the Dots: Golden Paths and Enhanced Workflows 🔗
The focus shifted to building integrated, cohesive plugins that create “golden paths” for developers.
- Example Workflow: A seamless process enabling developers to find a component, review code, update Jira, check CI/CD status, and finalize Jira updates – all within the portal.
- Result: This significantly streamlined workflows and led to a surge in visits, reaching the 2,000 margin.
January 2025: Tackling New Pain Points (Approaching 3,400 Users) 🎯
- Annual surveys identified new pain points, such as difficult access to environments.
- Collaboration with the infrastructure team resulted in a plugin for booking environments.
- Immediate Success: This plugin became the highest-used plugin on its first day and remains so to this day, showcasing the power of targeted solutions and cross-team collaboration.
Measuring Success and Charting the Future 📊
Ericsson’s approach to measuring success is holistic and data-driven:
- Leveraging Backstage’s Plugin Architecture: They utilize its plugin-based architecture and the vibrant open-source community for inner-sourcing plugins.
- Meticulous Tracking: Metrics for all portal content are tracked to identify popular and unpopular features, informing decisions on plugin sunsetting or consolidation.
- Combining Data with UX: Raw numbers are combined with UX techniques like observation sessions to gain deeper insights into actual developer behavior.
Developer Sentiment: A Measured Improvement ❤️
The realization that “developers are our customers” became a pivotal moment.
- Active Engagement: They employ strategies like developer demos and foster a diverse developer advocate group.
- Measurable Impact: Developer sentiment improved, moving from an NPS of -22 in 2023 to -2 in 2024. Positive sentiment is steadily growing as pain points are addressed.
The Road Ahead: AI, Automation, and Breaking Down Silos 🛣️
Looking forward, Ericsson is focused on:
- AI for Efficiencies: Leveraging artificial intelligence to drive further improvements.
- Continued Automation: Expanding automation efforts across the developer lifecycle.
- Removing Silos: A key focus is on plugin sharing and converging on common toolsets and cataloging standards.
The ultimate goal is to create a unified developer experience across the organization, embodying the principle that “the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.”
The Power of a Lean Team 💪
Remarkably, this extensive transformation was achieved with a six-person investment. This demonstrates that significant impact is possible without a massive team. Furthermore, Ericsson is exploring applying these developer experience principles to their external customer offerings, a topic detailed in a white paper.
Ericsson’s journey with Backstage is a testament to the power of understanding developer pain points, embracing a structured approach, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. It’s a story of transforming challenges into triumphs, one plugin and one delighted developer at a time. ✨