Consolidating 14 Developer Tools into One Portal for a Global Fintech

A Series D fintech with 320+ engineers across 5 offices was losing 6+ hours per developer per week to tool sprawl, context switching, and inconsistent onboarding. We delivered a Backstage-based Internal Developer Portal that unified 14 disconnected tools, reduced new hire onboarding from 3 weeks to 3 days, and drove 87% voluntary adoption within the first quarter.

The Challenge

Engineering leadership identified that developers were spending more time navigating internal tooling than writing code. Service ownership was unclear — incident response averaged 22 minutes just to identify the responsible team. New hires took 3 weeks to become productive because onboarding documentation was spread across Confluence, Notion, GitHub wikis, and tribal knowledge. CI/CD pipelines varied wildly across teams, causing repeated production incidents from misconfigured deployments. The platform team was overwhelmed with repetitive provisioning requests, handling 40+ tickets per week for environment setup alone.

Our Approach

Discovery & Platform Strategy — Weeks 1–2

Mapped developer journeys across all 14 tools, interviewed 30+ engineers, identified top pain points, and defined the target platform architecture.

• Developer journey mapping across CI/CD, observability, docs, and provisioning
• Stakeholder interviews with team leads, SREs, and new hires
• Tool audit and integration priority matrix
• Platform operating model and adoption strategy

Backstage Core & Service Catalog — Weeks 3–4

Deployed Backstage with SSO, built the service catalog from GitHub and Kubernetes discovery, and established ownership metadata across 200+ services.

• Okta SSO integration with fine-grained RBAC
• Automated service discovery from GitHub orgs and Kubernetes clusters
• Ownership, lifecycle, and dependency metadata for 200+ services
• Custom entity model for internal compliance requirements

Golden Paths & Self-Service — Weeks 5–6

Created 12 golden path templates for service creation, infrastructure provisioning, and data pipeline setup. Integrated Terraform and ArgoCD for automated delivery.

• 12 software templates covering microservices, BFFs, and batch jobs
• Terraform integration for infrastructure provisioning with policy guardrails
• ArgoCD plugin for GitOps deployment visibility
• Self-service environment creation with cost controls

TechDocs, Adoption & Rollout — Weeks 7–8

Migrated documentation into TechDocs, ran champion-led adoption sprints across teams, and established platform metrics for ongoing measurement.

• Migrated 400+ docs from Confluence and Notion into TechDocs
• Platform champions program across 8 product teams
• DORA metrics dashboard integrated into the portal
• Developer satisfaction baseline and tracking

Outcomes

Developer Onboarding

New hire time-to-productivity dropped from 3 weeks to 3 days. Onboarding documentation became self-serve through TechDocs with step-by-step golden paths.

Tool Consolidation

14 disconnected tools unified into a single portal. Developers saved an average of 6.2 hours per week previously lost to context switching.

Incident Response

Service ownership clarity reduced mean-time-to-identify-owner from 22 minutes to under 90 seconds via the service catalog.

Platform Team Load

Provisioning tickets dropped from 40+ per week to under 5. Self-service templates handled 90% of infrastructure requests without human intervention.