Spotify R&D

In case you missed yesterday’s webinar — luckily, we remembered to record it: 📺 https://lnkd.in/e5tfhY5h 🚀 See demos of the latest features in Spotify Portal, including our AI chatbot AiKA, Confidence Flags, Data Experience, and more. 🚀 Hear what DX’s Abi Noda had to say when we chatted with him about how to evaluate developer productivity. 🚀 Plus, Dave Bresci shares PagerDuty’s IDP journey — from running their own Backstage instance to switching to Spotify Portal. Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday and watched as we live demoed all the new features in one go 😅 Ready to 2× your productivity? Get free access to Spotify Portal + DX here: https://lnkd.in/eprSxh8P #Spotify #Backstage #devex #idp #webinar #supercharged #portals #ICYMI

The IDP of the future…is here tomorrow! Just one day left to register for our live webinar: 👉 https://hubs.li/Q03qnCDk0 Join us for demos of Portal and our latest plugins. Plus, we’ll chat with DX’s Abi Noda and PagerDuty’s Dave Bresci about how to maximize your internal developer portal to have a measurable impact on developer productivity. Building an IDP for the Future Weds., June 4 10:00 a.m. EDT (16:00 CEST) Live via Zoom See you tomorrow!

Last week was Spotify's companywide Hack Week. The theme was “Hit Play! Build with AI”▶️ — and our AI knowledge assistant, AiKA, was man/bot of the match.🤖 Not only did we see a huge increase in usage as teams across the company tapped into our RAG-based chatbot to access internal Spotify knowledge as they hacked, there were also plenty of Hack Week projects that revolved around building MCP servers to extend the capabilities of AiKA itself. Here are just a few of the internal stats on AiKA’s popularity during Hack Week: ↗️ Over 3,400 users engaged with AiKA (up 25% from the previous week) 💬 Nearly 218,000 chat messages were sent through AiKA 🛠️ 37 unique MCP servers were built AiKA is just one of the plugins — proven and tested at Spotify scale — that automatically comes with Spotify Portal, our SaaS solution for Backstage. 🗓️ Make sure to register for our June 4 webinar to see Portal, AiKA, and our other plugins in action: https://hubs.li/Q03pvyzP0 🚀 To try AiKA for yourself, apply for the Portal beta here: https://hubs.li/Q03pvtzS0 ▶️🤖

Invest like the best is one of my all time favorite podcasts that I’ve been listening to for years. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CFA is such a great, smart and well read host, that makes you feel right at home. I hope you enjoy it!

This week is Spotify’s companywide Hack Week! Many of the features that our listeners love and use every day started as a twinkle in some engineer’s/designer’s/product manager’s eye during a Spotify Hack Week: 🌟 Discover Weekly? Hack Week project. ☀️ Daylist? Hack Week project. 🦫 The open source framework for Backstage? Hack Week project! 🤖 And the new AI knowledge assistant that’s coming to Spotify Portal? A couple of Hack Weeks ago, there were so many promising projects focused on LLM chatbots, we decided to consolidate all the efforts into one — and, voilà, AiKA. But before they could ever become shipping products, those great ideas first had to become standout hacks. This year’s Hack Week theme is “Hit Play! Build with AI”▶️. As in years past, our ↔️ Skill Exchange plugin for Backstage plays a central role in ensuring that the week is a success: https://hubs.li/Q03nwQlH0 The plugin makes it easy for anyone to create or browse hack ideas, so everyone can find the project that excites them the most, allowing teams to self-organize across your org. It’s just one of the premium, Spotify-built plugins that automatically comes with Spotify Portal. 🚀 To see how Spotify Portal centralizes the efforts of your engineering org, apply for the beta here: https://hubs.li/Q03nwRgc0 🗓️ Make sure to register for our June 4 webinar to see Portal and our Spotify-built plugins in action: https://hubs.li/Q03nwQYK0 ▶️🤖

From The New Stack: “Spotify is an extreme dogfooding organization.” 🐕 It’s true! We test our developer productivity tools at Spotify scale — that’s how AiKA, our RAG-based AI chatbot, got its start. First, we developed it internally, proving its value and impact on our own teams, and now we’re working on bringing it to our enterprise customers as a plugin for Spotify Portal for Backstage. Read Jennifer Riggins' article in The New Stack to learn how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is able to unlock private data in such an efficient, useful way, and how AiKA makes it easier for anyone to access internal knowledge at Spotify — even non-developers: https://hubs.li/Q03l_Dh40 👀 From the article: “Now 25% of Spotify employees and 86% of Spotify developers use AiKA weekly — with more than 1,000 daily users. The [platform developer experience] team also receives regular requests from teams across the company for how to make their documentation available within AiKA. Ever the inner-sourcing company, AiKA closes that positive feedback loop by encouraging Spotify users to not only use, but to find and fix gaps in documentation.” Want to see AiKA in action? Register for our live webinar on June 4: https://hubs.li/Q03l_tPH0 👈 Building an IDP for the Future 🔮 Weds., June 4 10:00 a.m. EDT (16:00 CEST) Live via Zoom We’ll be joined by researchers from DX and our design partner PagerDuty who will share their IDP journey using the Spotify Portal beta. Plus, demos of AiKA and more. 🤖🐕

We won another award for Backstage! 🏆 Actually, we won it back in December, but we didn’t get the sparkly little fella into our hands until just last week. 🤗 Behold! The 2025 DEVIES Award for “Best Innovation in Developer Collaboration & Workflow Tools”🙌 — now in the proud hands of Spotify’s Pia Nilsson, senior director of platform developer experience and GM of Backstage, and Stefan Särne, senior staff engineer and Backstage tech lead. Congrats to all the Backstage teams at Spotify and everyone in the Backstage community! And thanks (again) for the honor, DeveloperWeek! https://hubs.li/Q03k1Bc70 👉🏆🤩

I am excited to be joining Tim Chinchen from PagerDuty at AWS Summit next week. We'll be discussing everything Resilience and AI! 🗓️ AWS Summit April 30th - 12:10 South Theatre (S)