references/developer-platform.md

# Internal developer platform as a product

Start with developer personas and top tasks (new service, change config, deploy, secrets rotation, incident triage, compliance evidence). Measure current time, friction, errors and dependencies. Prioritize high-frequency golden paths with templates and safe defaults before choosing a portal.

Catalog/service metadata, ownership, service templates and scorecards can help when they reduce manual work. Make escape hatches and exception review explicit. Platform owner maintains templates, lifecycle and support.

Measure lead time, success/failure of golden paths, time-to-first-deploy, support load, and adoption satisfaction; do not claim value from catalog page views alone.

Docs: https://backstage.io/docs/ ; https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/11/19/what-is-platform-engineering/