Nick McKenzie, Mauritius Commercial Bank
What happens when you adopt Backstage without planning to? In this talk, we’ll share what we learned from rolling out Backstage across 40 teams and 350+ developers in a highly regulated environment. What started as a simple effort to improve service discoverability quickly grew into a broader platform initiative — one that now supports engineering health checks, skills tracking, and cross-functional alignment across Architecture, QA, and SRE.
We’ll share the good, the hard, and the unexpected. You’ll walk away with practical, hard-earned advice on adoption, driving engagement, avoiding common traps, and keeping things simple.
Whether you're just starting your Backstage journey or trying to scale it, this talk will give you the real story — and the tools to make it work in your context.
Nick McKenzie is a technologist with 20 years’ experience in designing and implementing software solutions. Over the course of his career he has worked as a developer, architect, analyst and development manager delivering systems in myriad industries and platforms.
He is passionate about working with teams to deliver great software and building the right culture to let that happen. He has been fortunate to have worked with and learned from some of the best thinkers and practitioners in Agile & DevOps both in South Africa and Internationally. His view is that approaches such as Clean Code, Test Driven Development and Continuous Delivery are fundamental to delivering great software.
author = {Nicholas Mckenzie},
title = {Lessons from a Year with Backstage: What Worked, What {Didn{\textquoteright}t}, and {What{\textquoteright}s} Next},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}