Case study — B2B SaaS

Built a self-service platform that ships 14 deploys/day across 9 squads.

A 60-engineer B2B SaaS replaced its Slack-based deploy queue with Backstage golden paths and a merge queue — lead time fell from days to hours.

14/day
deploy frequency
4.2 min
MTTR
9
squads on platform

Context

Linewise's nine squads shared one monorepo with a 40-minute CI run and a deploy queue coordinated in a Slack channel. A single SRE team owned every production change.

Deploys averaged two per day for the whole company — and incident response meant log archaeology across six tools.

The challenge

Squads were blocked on each other and on SRE; ownership boundaries didn't exist in the infrastructure even though they existed on the org chart.

MTTR was measured in hours because finding the right logs took longer than fixing the bug.

Approach

  1. Paved roads

    Weeks 1–6

    Backstage developer portal with golden-path templates: new service, new queue worker, new cron — each scaffolds repo, pipeline, dashboards, and ownership metadata in one step.

  2. CI/CD overhaul

    Weeks 4–10

    Reusable GitHub Actions workflows with test sharding and a merge queue cut CI from 40 to 9 minutes; per-squad deploy pipelines removed the shared queue entirely.

  3. Unified observability

    Weeks 8–12

    Grafana + Loki consolidated six tools into one. Every golden-path service ships with dashboards, SLOs, and alert routing to its owning squad.

  4. You-build-you-run enablement

    Weeks 12–14

    On-call training, incident-review process, and scorecards in Backstage. SRE moved from gatekeeper to platform team.

Architecture

Developer portal
BackstageGolden pathsScorecards
Delivery
GitHub ActionsMerge queuePer-squad pipelines
Platform
EKSNamespace-per-squadProgressive delivery
Observability
GrafanaLokiSquad-routed alerts
Golden-path scaffolding wires every new service into pipelines, ownership, and observability from commit one.

Results

14/day
deploy frequency

Up from 2/day company-wide; squads deploy independently.

4.2 min
MTTR

Down from hours — alerts route to owners with the right dashboard linked.

9 min
CI runtime

Down from 40 minutes via sharding and the merge queue.

9
squads on platform

100% adoption within one quarter, no mandate required.

“The platform sells itself: the golden path is genuinely the easiest way to ship. Nobody has opened the old Slack deploy channel in months.”

— Director of Engineering, Linewise

Stack

GitHub ActionsBackstageGrafanaLokiEKS