# How Booking.com Uses Backstage to Support Distributed Ownership in Its Engineering Portal

DevFeed: [How Booking.com Uses Backstage to Support Distributed Ownership in Its Engineering Portal](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-necessity-of-imperfection-23726.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/booking-com-development/the-necessity-of-imperfection-21c289c87515?source=rss----1c36c35f9c76---4>)

Author: Matthew Pennell

Published: 2026-02-02T16:26:13Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Booking.com Development - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/booking-com-development-medium.md>)

Topics: [Backstage](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backstage.md>), [developer-productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/developer-productivity.md>), [Tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tooling.md>), [ui](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ui.md>)

Tags: [backstage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backstage.md>), [company](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/company.md>), [developer-productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer-productivity.md>), [platform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform.md>), [software-development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-development.md>), [tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tooling.md>), [user-interface](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/user-interface.md>), [ux-design](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ux-design.md>)

## AI overview

Booking.com describes adopting Backstage for its internal Engineering Portal, where autonomous teams own different features and tooling. The article explains that Backstage's plugin-based architecture provided the flexibility needed to support the company's complex engineering environment while addressing interface inconsistency and developer friction.

## Source excerpt

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. And somewhere in the middle are systems we could build, but that would be better served by a framework which handles the fundamentals and lets us focus on the details unique to our environment. Our Engineering Portal is one of those systems: essential for governance, ownership, productivity and visibility, yet also something that thousands of engineers should be able to use easily without having to think too hard about it. There are plenty of off-the-shelf developer portals available. Port, Cycloid, Configure8, Rely and OpsLevel among others all offer their own take on managing engineering ecosystems and come with slick interfaces, integrations and (of course, nowadays) various forms of AI assistance. However, in such a mature and complex environment as Booking (approaching 30 years in business at the time of writing), the deciding factor wasn't the surface polish -- it was flexibility. After all that time layering, modernising and occasi