A Product Story: The Lessons of Backstage and Spotify’s Autonomous Culture

TLDR; In episode 08 of our podcast series “Spotify: A Product Story”, we share stories and lessons from building and open sourcing Backstage, our homegrown developer portal. Hear why a developer-friendly, market-based platform like Backstage could only have been developed at Spotify (where autonomy is prized, not top-down mandates) and why that ends up making Backstage such a flexible fit for other companies, too. Listen to the episode now and get all our hard-earned lessons in entertaining podcast form — or read on for episode highlights and to learn more about this critical time in Spotify’s growth.

The story begins five years ago when Spotify had a problem: we were growing fast. Really, really fast. This should be a great problem to have, except that instead of speeding us up, adding new hires was actually slowing us down. 

As Director of Engineering Pia Nilsson explains in the podcast, one of the metrics Spotify’s Platform team used to measure productivity was onboarding time: how long did it take for a new engineer to merge their tenth pull request at Spotify? 

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