More and more organizations are turning to product-based and platform-enabled engineering to improve developer experience and move faster. A big part of that shift is building an internal developer portal — whether it’s homegrown or using tools like Backstage.

Getting started is usually the easy part. The real challenge comes later — driving adoption, managing complexity, and making it useful at scale.

In this talk, I’ll share lessons learned from helping teams — from 20 developers to thousands of engineers — design and maintain developer portals that deliver real, measurable value. We’ll look at the architectural decisions, design patterns, and adoption strategies that can help your portal go beyond being just another tool — and become something your developers want to use and leaders believe is important in achieving business outcome.