The Stack Overflow Podcast Getting Backstage in front of a shifting dev experience
Sep 26, 2025
Pia Nilsson, GM for Backstage and head of Developer Experience at Spotify, shares her fascinating journey from social psychology to tech leadership. She discusses the rapid growth of Backstage, highlighting its role in enhancing developer experience and addressing tool sprawl. Pia reveals how AI is transforming workflows and the importance of integration for seamless service discovery. Delving into platform engineering, she emphasizes the balance between standardization and the need for innovative tools, showcasing how Backstage tailors solutions for various user needs.
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Career Pivot Into Platform Engineering
- Pia Nilsson fell into technology after taking a programming class and became a software engineer for 14 years.
- She later moved into leadership and gravitated to platform engineering to build lasting systems.
Backstage Adoption And Offerings
- Backstage now has ~3,400 known adopters including many Fortune 500 companies.
- Spotify ships Backstage as open source and also as opinionated SaaS to accelerate adoption.
AI Multiplies The Need For IDPs
- AI dramatically increases component and code generation scale, multiplying the number of artifacts to manage.
- That growth makes an IDP like Backstage more essential to track compliance, security, and ownership.