Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Tyler Davis
Senior Software Engineer at Canva
November 20, 2025
In This Episode
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tyler Davis, a software engineer at Canva, for a deep dive into the often-overlooked world of internal tooling. They also unpack how Canva connects developer joy to business outcomes, measures ROI, and treats its internal platform as a product.
The discussion follows Canva’s multi-year journey of building out its internal developer platform. Tyler shares firsthand experience from the front lines, including the team's evolution from a homegrown catalog on Backstage to adopting Cortex. Ganesh and Tyler also have a candid chat about the build-versus-buy debate, the psychology of sunken costs, and how to decide when to invest in custom solutions versus buying off-the-shelf.
You’ll learn
The best internal tools delight engineers and are frictionless to use. Treat internal users like customers whose experience is paramount.
ROI can be measured through two lenses: the delight a tool brings to developers, and the leverage it gives the organization to solve entire classes of problems at scale.
A service catalog provides limited value on its own. Its power is unlocked by applications like Scorecards that turn metadata into action and insight.
The build vs. buy framework.
Canva reframed its investment in a homegrown platform not as a waste, but as a series of lessons that enabled a better long-term decision.
Operational excellence is about shifting from a reactive to a proactive mindset: preventing incidents before they happen and rewarding non-feature work.
Quotes
"When I think about the best internal tools, I often think about the same kind of metrics that I would judge a product that I get off the shelf. It's the level of joy that I get out of using it... it kind of touches on the idea of treating your internal tool users as customers. Just because they're engineers inside your company doesn't mean they should have to suffer through some kind of rough experience."
Tyler Davis
Senior Software Engineer at Canva
"The catalog, it's sort of obvious to me. I take it for granted that the catalog has a lot of value, mostly because of the things we built on top of it... I don't necessarily think the catalog alone provides an immense amount of value. I think it's what the catalog enables that really provides the value. That's what we saw firsthand."
Tyler Davis
Senior Software Engineer at Canva
"What it comes down to is what you want to spend your time and energy on... in the end, the product that we end up with will be very similar to the thing that we can get off the shelf. And we could have been spending all that time doing things that we value more highly. It's just about what your competencies are as a company... unless you're a company named Cortex, you probably don't want to be spending your time building an IDP. The tools that you wanna build internally are the tools that are unique to you."
Tyler Davis
Senior Software Engineer at Canva
"It is a real cost, it is something that you actually paid. But I think for us, the way that I ended up thinking about this is we didn't waste our time. We built something that we used and we got value out of it... The most important thing, of course, is all the stuff we learned along the way. I don't think I would've been nearly as well equipped to set up Cortex without all that experience building on Backstage, honestly. We had a lot of hard-earned lessons that we still keep with us."
Tyler Davis
Senior Software Engineer at Canva
"For me, it comes down to two things. It's preventing incidents before they happen, and not relying on heroes in your organization to do that with no incentive structure... building some sort of mechanism internally to actually reward people for doing that sort of work."
Tyler Davis
Senior Software Engineer at Canva
Timestamps
00:48
Discussing the qualities of the best internal tools
01:24
Treating internal users like customers and the value of "developer joy"
02:48
How to define the boundaries of internal tooling
05:45
Using delight and leverage to measure the ROI of internal tools
09:27
The grassroots lifecycle of successful internal tools
12:17
How Canva's IDP journey evolved into a service catalog
14:46
Realizing a catalog's true value comes from its applications
17:40
Why Canva decided to move from a homegrown Backstage instance to Cortex
23:25
A framework for the build vs. buy decision
26:37
Overcoming the sunken cost fallacy and valuing lessons learned
29:40
A practical definition of operational excellence
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