At Spotify, serving 675M users, hyper-growth in 2014 created system fragmentation that made onboarding engineers difficult. We learned effective abstraction teaches complexity rather than hiding it.

This isn’t theoretical, it’s a war story with measurable outcomes. Most talks about abstraction focus on code design patterns. This talk focuses on operational reality at massive scale, showing how abstraction decisions directly impact business continuity when serving 675+ million users. The “graduated disclosure” framework I’ll present has been battle-tested in production and represents a novel approach to balancing developer productivity with operational transparency. This talk balances technical depth with accessibility, technical enough for senior engineers, accessible enough for those newer to large-scale systems.