Dev Interrupted Backstage’s journey from spreadsheets to global IDP standard | Spotify’s Tyson Singer
20 snips
Jan 20, 2026 Tyson Singer, Head of Technology and Platforms at Spotify, discusses the transformative journey from spreadsheets to Backstage in managing their microservices ecosystem. He reveals how Spotify aligns teams with 'golden paths' and adopts a product mindset for internal tools. Tyson highlights the success of the AI Knowledge Assistant, which slashed support tickets by nearly 50%. He also explores the evolution of Backstage into a SaaS offering and shares insights on cultivating a culture of sustainable innovation within engineering teams.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
From Spreadsheets To A Managed Catalog
- Spotify moved from spreadsheets to a single managed software catalog to track thousands of microservices and the people who owned them.
- This catalog solved rapid ownership changes and reduced duplicated capabilities across autonomous teams.
Visibility Aligns Behavior To Golden Paths
- Baking visibility into developer workflows makes golden paths discoverable and repeatable across a large org.
- Showing the "easy" and "right" way shifts behavior without heavy enforcement.
Hack Weeks Built Backstage's Ecosystem
- Spotify opened Backstage for internal contribution and ran hack weeks to encourage plugins from feature teams.
- By year-end they had over 100 plugins contributed across the company.