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A Global Enterprise Scaling Their Digital Organization

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A Global Enterprise Scaling Their Digital Organization

A global manufacturing enterprise was rapidly expanding its digital organization. With hundreds of engineers distributed across regions and a growing portfolio of digital products, the leadership team faced a critical question:
 
How do we enable product teams to build, ship, and operate software with greater speed, clarity, and confidence at global scale?

Despite a strong engineering culture, several constraints were still impacting productivity

  • Fragmented developer tooling and inconsistent onboarding
  • Limited visibility into services, ownership, and quality
  • Lack of operational consistency in product engineering

To address these challenges, the organization needed a scalable Developer Experience platform and a strengthened platform engineering foundation capable of supporting its growing digital footprint.

For this, the organization chose Spotify Backstage as the core platform to unify tooling, improve discoverability, and establish consistent engineering workflows across teams.

Spotify Backstage delivers a unified developer portal built for self-service, knowledge sharing, transparency and observability.

Hire not just great people,
hire a great team

The initial implementation and enabling of the out-of-the-box features the first step. Next steps of turning it in to a product centric platform with many custom features and a high user adaptation was the next challenge. The organization had a lot of requirements, but only few resources available. 

To address these challenges, the enterprise engaged with the Dewise DevTeam TO‑GO, a cross‑functional, high‑performing team designed to blend directly into their engineering organization across remote, on‑site, or hybrid setups.

Accelerating Product Engineering Through Spotify Backstage

Dewise supported the company in adopting and scaling Spotify Backstage as the central Developer Experience platform. Our work focused on turning Backstage from an open source solution into an enterprise‑ready, production‑grade solution.
 
These improvements significantly reduced onboarding time, enhanced discoverability, and enabled automated self‑service workflows across engineering teams.

Specialized Technical Expertise

Meeting the organization’s ambitious goals requires a deep and diverse technical skillset. DevTeam‑to‑Go provided:
  • Full‑stack platform engineering capabilities (frontend and backend)
  • Backstage‑specific expertise to implement, maintain, and scale the platform
  • Experience evolving an open‑source foundation into a robust, maintainable, enterprise‑ready system

Alongside these capabilities, the team worked with a technical stack tailored to enterprise‑scale platform engineering and Developer Experience needs, including:

  • Frontend: React, TypeScript, Backstage plugin framework
  • Backend: Node.js, Express, Backstage backend plugins
  • Platform Engineering: Kubernetes, containerized services, platform APIs, infrastructure orchestration
  • Cloud & Access: AWS services, Azure AD/Entra ID, OIDC/SSO integration, role‑based access models
  • CI/CD & Automation: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, automated validation and provisioning pipelines
  • Infrastructure Visibility: Cloud and on‑premise asset discovery, inventory connectors
  • FinOps & Cost Insights: Usage analytics, cost and capacity dashboards
  • Observability: Metrics, service health views, incident and reliability insights
  • Documentation & DevEx: Tech Docs framework, software templates, workflow automation, and people‑focused plugins for developer profiles, communities, events, and mentoring

Extended Platform Capabilities

To support the organization’s growing digital ecosystem, Dewise extended Backstage with a set of capabilities that improved visibility, streamlined delivery, and brought core engineering workflows into one platform.

Product, Platform & Infrastructure Capabilities

We introduced an enterprise‑wide catalog covering digital products, platform components, and APIs, creating a single source for understanding ownership and dependencies. Platform self‑service workflows were added to help teams request platform services, manage infrastructure provisioning, and handle role‑based access without manual handover. Backstage was further extended to support cloud and on‑premise asset discovery, as well as cost and capacity insights used for financial and operational planning. Operational needs were addressed through a Site Reliability and incident management cockpit, alongside views for product health, compliance status, and integrated Tech Docs.

Standardized Software Delivery

Software templates were introduced to give product teams a consistent way to create new services aligned with established patterns, reducing setup time, and improving delivery consistency across the organization.

Community, Learning & Engagement Plugins

To strengthen collaboration and knowledge sharing, we implemented a set of people‑focused features directly inside Backstage. These included:
  • Developer profiles that helped teams understand skills, interests, and areas of expertise
  • Community and group hubs for discovering internal initiatives and connecting with peers
  • Event modules for promoting tech talks, learning sessions, and engineering gatherings
  • Mentoring pathways that supported growth, guidance, and cross‑team learning
These additions provided a unified place for internal engagement, enabling developers to connect, learn, and participate in the engineering community within the same platform they use for their daily work.

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