Tech Radar

Created a Backstage Tech Radar plugin with supporting automation to make technology governance visible and actionable, enabling a smooth contribution and review flow for both viewers and contributors.

Oct 2025 - Jan 2026

tech-radar

Tech Radar

The Tech Radar visualises the technologies used and recommended across the organisation. It helps teams discover, evaluate, and align on tools and platforms for their projects.

The radar aggregates blips, small YAML descriptors of technologies stored in a central technologies GitHub repository and onboarded into Backstage, the internal developer portal. Each blip represents a technology and its current adoption recommendation.

The radar is divided into four zones:

  • Adopt: Technologies we have high confidence in and recommend for widespread use

  • Trial and Assess: Technologies worth exploring to understand their impact on the enterprise

  • Hold: Technologies that should be used with caution or avoided for new projects

  • Retire: Technologies that should be phased out

Context & Problem

The Tech Radar already existed before this project, but without a clear governance model. As a result:

  • No team formally owned technology decisions

  • Data quickly became outdated

  • Engineers did not know how or when to propose changes

  • Governance happened informally, outside the product

The lack of the governance needed to be fixed.

My Role

I designed and implemented:

  • The Tech Radar frontend

  • The contribution and governance workflow

  • The technical integration between GitHub, CI, and Backstage

  • Stakeholder alignment

I owned the work end-to-end, from problem framing to production.

Solution

techradarsolution

Establishing ERB-Owned Governance

I introduced a new governance model where the Engineering Review Board (ERB) becomes the formal owner of the Tech Radar.

ERB now:

  • Reviews technology proposals

  • Approves or rejects changes

  • Acts as the long-term steward of the radar

This turned the Tech Radar from a static visualisation into a maintained decision system.

Designing the Contribution Experience

I designed the experience of adding a blip as well as the data has to come from the engineers.

The new flow:

  1. Engineers propose technologies via the ERB’s GitHub project board

  2. ERB reviews proposals as part of their existing governance process

  3. Once approved, ERB opens a pull request using a structured template in the technologies repository so that no coding is needed

  4. CI validates the blip and automatically updates the Tech Radar in Backstage

The process is transparent, predictable, and aligned with how engineers and ERB already work.

Redesigning the Tech Radar Experience

In parallel, I redesigned and implemented the Tech Radar interface to make technology decisions easier to understand and compare.

Key improvements:

  • Clearer visualisation of adoption state, reducing cognitive load when scanning the radar

  • Text and tag based search, allowing users to quickly find relevant technologies

  • Multi-blip highlighting, enabling side-by-side comparison across zones

    • For example, searching for "monitoring" highlights Tool 1 in Adopt and Tool 2 in Retire

  • Category-based views, separating technologies into Platforms, Languages & Frameworks, and Tools

These changes shifted the radar from a static overview to an interactive decision-support interface.

Impact

  • Tech Radar data stays up to date by design

  • Technology comparisons are faster and clearer

  • Governance is visible and documented

  • Engineers know exactly how to contribute

  • ERB retains control without additional overhead

The system is now embedded to already existing workflow.