Combining Product Thinking & Spotify’s Backstage
summary
Building Nationale Nederlanden’s IDP uses Spotify Backstage as the portal engine while targeting support for ~2,000 engineers, combining product research, UX and platform work. They hire a user researcher and a UX designer, run a DevEx survey showing 66% spend too much time in meetings and 40% field colleague queries, map a 150‑step service blueprint, document a 100+ step golden path after one API required talking to 62 people and six months, prototype an API paved road, run Backstage on React/Node/TypeScript/Kubernetes/Postgres and spike a local‑first data puddle that generates Backstage YAML.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 3:15Product thinking for us
- 6:57IDP
- 9:19Story 1: Designing a DevEx survey
- 13:53Summary Story 1
- 14:36Story 2: You don't get it!
- 20:12Summary Story 2
- 21:00Story 3: All we need is an API to get insurance data
- 26:58Recipe 1: Define principles
- 29:02Recipe 2: Hire the right engineers
- 30:12Recipe 3: Tech assessment
- 31:19Recipe 4: Get ready to read Backstage code
- 32:07Recipe 5: Embrace Backstage system model
- 33:08Recipe 6: Extend Backstage system model
- 34:12Recipe 7: Local-first engineering data warehouse
- 37:20Summary Story 3
- 37:42Conclusion
- 40:21Outro
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