Developer Home
A developer portal for 4,000+ engineers, built from concept to launch
The Problem
Adobe had a classic enterprise developer tooling problem: hundreds of services, dozens of teams, and no single place to discover what existed or how to use it. New engineers spent their first weeks just figuring out what tools were available. Senior engineers wasted hours helping them.
Onboarding took weeks. Discoverability was tribal knowledge. There was no canonical source of truth for who owned what — which meant incidents were slower, migrations were painful, and tech debt was invisible.
The Approach
We built Developer Home on top of Spotify’s Backstage — the open-source developer portal framework — rather than starting from scratch. The bet: extend an active, battle-tested platform with Adobe-specific plugins instead of rebuilding what Backstage already did well.
Key decisions:
- Software catalog first — The core value proposition was discoverability. Before adding dashboards or integrations, we made sure every service had a recorded owner, documentation link, and runbook. If the catalog wasn’t trusted, nothing else mattered.
- Progressive adoption, no mandates — We launched to a single org, learned hard, then expanded. We never forced adoption. Teams joined because it was useful.
- Integrations over migrations — Backstage’s plugin model let us connect Adobe’s existing CI/CD dashboards, on-call schedules, and tech debt tooling without asking teams to migrate anything.
On building with Backstage
Backstage’s flexibility is both its superpower and its trap. It’s easy to build a portal that does twelve things poorly. The discipline is staying focused on the catalog — everything else is only valuable if the catalog is accurate and trusted.
The Outcome
- Developer portal launched to all 4,000+ Adobe engineers within 18 months
- 1,400+ services cataloged with verified owners and documentation
- Time-to-first-commit for new engineers reduced significantly
- Became the foundation for Adobe’s subsequent developer experience investments
What I Learned
The software catalog is the product. Everything downstream — CI/CD integration, tech radar, on-call viewer — is only valuable if the catalog is accurate and trusted. We invested disproportionately in catalog health early, and it paid off for every feature we shipped after.
The other lesson: internal tools live or die by the champion network. You need a handful of engineering leads who believe in the vision and pull their teams along. Top-down mandates don’t build trust. Peer momentum does.