When Adam Rogal, Director of Engineering, joined DoorDash, one of the primary challenges the engineering organization faced was the lack of clarity around service ownership and the scattered nature of developer tools across the organization. Engineers struggled to identify who was responsible for different services, leading to delays and confusion. At the same time, essential tools for development were spread across various locations—ranging from command-line interfaces to Slack bots—creating inefficiencies and slowing down workflows.
This disorganization became a critical issue as DoorDash’s engineering organization scaled. Without a central hub, engineers constantly had to switch between multiple systems, reducing productivity. The absence of a unified platform made it difficult for engineers to focus on development, as they spent considerable time navigating different tools and figuring out ownership. It became clear that a centralized developer portal was necessary to streamline processes and support the company’s rapid growth.
The team believed that creating a centralized developer portal would reduce friction for engineers by consolidating all necessary resources—like debugging tools, quality metrics, and service ownership information—into a single platform. This would eliminate the need for engineers to jump between multiple systems, streamline workflows, and allow them to focus more on actual development tasks.
They also hypothesized that the portal would encourage collaboration across teams. By making it easier for engineers to contribute to shared tools and resources within a community-driven platform, they anticipated quicker value delivery and broader adoption throughout the engineering teams.
To track the effectiveness of the developer portal and identify areas for improvement, DoorDash focused on several key metrics:
The solution they landed on was a centralized platform called DevConsole, designed to serve as a home for all engineering tools and resources at DoorDash. These solutions were designed to streamline workflows and improve overall productivity for engineers:
The initial rollout of DevConsole began during a hackathon, where Adam Rogal and his team built the first version featuring Test Studio and the quality dashboard. After winning the hackathon, they capitalized on the momentum and gradually expanded the portal, introducing more tools that met the immediate needs of engineers.
As more teams adopted DevConsole, it transitioned into a community-driven platform. Over time, new plugins were added, such as debuggers and developer velocity tracking tools, addressing broader needs within the engineering organization. Codelabs were also introduced to streamline the onboarding process for new engineers. As adoption continued to grow, DevConsole became a central part of DoorDash’s engineering workflow, with continuous improvements driven by feedback from the engineers who used it.
Listen to the full story here → Bootstrapping a developer portal