Spotify: A Product Story 08: When to build vs buy - and when to open source
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Apr 28, 2021 
Spotify’s engineers tackle the growing pains of onboarding, building Backstage to help teams find the tools and services they need. They trace its journey from an internal platform to open source, while exploring when building beats buying and what it takes to make an open-source project thrive.
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Treat Engineers As Real Users
- Engineers are users too and deserve the same product discipline applied to consumer apps.
- Pia Nilsson used user research and onboarding metrics to discover interruptions and poor discoverability were doubling engineer ramp time to ~60 days.
Spaghetti Code Slowed Engineers Down
- Spotify's internal codebase was vast and messy, nicknamed spaghetti code.
- Tyson Singer found AB testing code in mobile clients nearly indecipherable, causing engineers to copy-paste working bits rather than understand systems.
Unify Autonomy With A Marketplace
- A marketplace model can unify an autonomous org without mandating standards.
- Backstage visualizes services and exposes plugins so teams voluntarily pick best tools, letting strong ideas rise to the top.