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User Personas

P1 — Product Engineer​

"I just want to ship features. I don't want to think about Kubernetes."

Needs​

  • One-click service creation with sensible defaults
  • Visibility into whether my service is healthy across dev, staging, and prod
  • Ability to request a database or queue without writing YAML
  • Fast onboarding when joining a new team

Friction Today​

Spends 30–60 min per week on DevOps coordination.

Success State​

Spends 0–5 min per week on platform interactions.

P2 — Tech Lead / Senior Engineer​

"I need to know the state of everything my team owns — dependencies, deploys, incidents."

Needs​

  • Single pane of glass for service health, dependency graph, and deployment status
  • Ability to promote releases to production with appropriate gates
  • Ability to onboard new services with correct architecture from day one
  • API and documentation catalog for services they own

Friction Today​

Juggles Grafana, ArgoCD UI, Kubernetes CLI, and Slack.

Success State​

Backstage is the single entry point; deep links to other tools when needed.

P3 — Platform Engineer​

"I need to define the platform once and have teams adopt it correctly."

Needs​

  • Encode conventions in templates so teams can't deviate
  • Review surface that makes convention violations visible before merge
  • Ability to apply cross-cutting changes (new label, new quota) without touching every domain repo
  • Visibility into platform service health across all clusters

Friction Today​

Reviews 10–20 PRs per day, many with convention mistakes.

Success State​

PRs arrive correct; CI catches violations before review.

P4 — Engineering Manager / Director​

"I need to know who owns what, what's running in production, and what it costs."

Needs​

  • Org chart linked to catalog ownership
  • Overview of domain health and deployment frequency
  • Compliance posture (are prod changes following the approval process?)
  • Onboarding/offboarding audit trail

Friction Today​

No single view — must aggregate Slack, JIRA, spreadsheets.

Success State​

Backstage org view with ownership, system health, and deploy history.

P5 — Security / Compliance​

"I need to know that production changes are approved, access is least-privilege, and secrets are not in plain text."

Needs​

  • Prod deploy requires human approval (no automated push to prod)
  • RBAC is auditable and tied to identity provider groups
  • Secrets encrypted at rest and in Git (Sealed Secrets)
  • Network isolation by project boundary

Friction Today​

No central access registry; RBAC is ad-hoc and undocumented.

Success State​

All access is group-based, auditable, and enforced by convention.