Yelp has accomplished remarkable things in the realm developer tools. It opened sourced its open-source project, Backstage, in 2020. Since its launch, Backstage has been overwhelmed with interest, signing up over 2 million developers from 3,400 organizations. This major expansion signifies the growing demand for powerful, efficient developer platforms in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape.
Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines are just a few of the big names that have adopted Backstage to make their development processes more efficient. The platform provides teams with the tools to rapidly build, manage and secure their services, creating a more productive and collaborative environment.
Premium Offerings and Advancements
Alongside this open-source initiative, Spotify has released a premium, managed product, named Spotify Portal for Backstage. Intended for both utility and private sector commercial use cases, this fully managed SaaS product is nearing general availability over the next few months. The mission-driven company wants to position itself to serve the increasing need for fast, efficient developer solutions with this major new release.
Notable design partners and early customers of Spotify Portal include the Linux Foundation and Pager Duty. The collaboration with these organizations underscores Spotify’s commitment to building a robust ecosystem around Backstage and supporting various customer needs.
Tyson Singer, who recently led business development efforts for Spotify, shared the different customer archetypes that have developed. This change came on the heels of the introduction of the premium product. He challenged us to be responsive to the complex needs of our users. This is extremely important for maintaining Backstage’s edge in a fast-growing and competitive market.
“We discovered that there were a lot of different customer profiles,” – Tyson Singer
Innovation Through Internal Initiatives
Spotify’s commitment to innovation extends beyond Backstage. The company is the creators of a recently launched A/B experimentation platform, Confidence. That powerful new tool has been working in stealth mode since it was announced almost 20 months ago. This platform is designed to improve fund decision-making and product feature prioritization using data-driven insights.
Spotify has recently launched an AiKA, or Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Assistant. This chatbot is intended to engage employees with their company’s collective knowledge base and guide them through it. Created through one of Spotify’s 2023 Internal Hackathon, AiKA is currently being used on a weekly basis by 25% of Spotify’s Global Workforce. This high adoption rate is a main indicator of the tool’s success in creating and sustaining a culture of continuous improvement.
Tyson Singer added that AiKA helped to shift the culture inside their organization. He explained that the system was simple, but at the same time, very impactful. Because it’s been adopted so rapidly, it has pushed staff to maintain a current state of their documents.
“It kind of sounds simple, but it’s powerful, and we got super-high adoption very quickly internally,” – Tyson Singer
Recognition and Future Prospects
Backstage’s journey as a project has not escaped the attention of the tech community. That popularity led the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to accept Backstage as an incubating project in 2022. As a result, it rapidly grew last year to become one of CNCF’s top five projects by activity and velocity. This recognition speaks to Backstage’s increasing impact in the developer tools ecosystem.
Perhaps as important as Spotify’s strategy is the technology development focus they are taking with this initiative. More than a decade ago, the company created its own container orchestration platform, Helios. This innovation allowed them to easily adopt a microservices architecture. The impact of this experience has gone a long way toward making Backstage a better, more useful tool for developers.
As Spotify continues to innovate and expand its offerings, it remains focused on building a sustainable business model around Backstage. Tyson Singer of the Bipartisan Policy Center found that an essential tension shined through the entire process – innovation vs. commercial viability.
“We’re a business — and we also want to build a healthy business on top of all this,” – Tyson Singer