The necessity of imperfection

The necessity of imperfection: Designing for distributed ownership in Backstage

Imagine an internal engineering platform — tooling that is accessed by thousands of developers every day — where every new feature, every piece of critical functionality, is designed, built and maintained by a different, autonomous team.

For years, that was the reality of our internal tooling at Booking.com; a productive, necessary chaos. Engineers had the freedom to build and deploy exactly what they needed, but the cumulative effect was a user interface that was about as far from being a unified ecosystem as it was possible to get. The resulting friction, cognitive load, and sheer inconsistency was a silent, daily tax on developer productivity.

Booking.com, like any established tech company, has a sprawling collection of internal tools. Some are commonplace across the industry, such as Google Drive, Jira, Workday, Zoom, Figma and Miro. Others are so specific to the way that we work that building them ourselves has always been the most practical option.