When considering or advocating for an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) within your organization, assessing potential impact is an exciting, but sometimes challenging endeavor, especially considering the broad set of use cases IDPs support and the lack of context and visibility before the presence of an IDP.
Maybe you understand the inherent value of an IDP, but need to quantify the estimated savings/impact to justify the spend.
Or maybe you’re still exploring the internal developer category in total, and would like a framework to evaluate financial and operational benefits tailored to your organization’s goals.
Whether you view it as a cost-saving measure, a catalyst for innovation, or a tool for mitigating risks, the key to making the case lies in quantifying its impact in the areas that matter most to your organization.
We’ll explore some of the common impact areas of an IDP, lightweight frameworks for calculating return on investment, and how to align these metrics with your organization’s priorities.
But before we dive in…
Not all IDPs are alike.
Many IDPs don’t have executive views with hierarchical rollups — reducing the impact of the IDP. For example, if management can’t easily see which teams are operating at a high level, it’s hard to apply those best practices to other teams.
Some IDPs don’t even have the concept of scorecards, the mechanism that allows you to continuously assess and improve. And even within those solutions that do have scorecards, if scorecards are rigid or require your platform team to build them, it’s much harder (and takes longer) to make progress against whatever goal is right in front of you.
Most IDPs don’t have multi-step workflows, or the ability to apply conditional logic. Workflows are the way to build golden paths that interact with multiple tools in your ecosystem; a major factor in improving not only productivity, but alignment to standards. As you explore IDPs, make sure to double click into this area—some IDPs may tout workflows with multiple actions, but you’re tasked with manually writing each step and relying on a single API call.
And one more example: Most IDPs don’t address the foundation—the ultimate unlock for any use case in front of you: ownership. Ownership is at the heart of engineering excellence.
Without clear ownership:
Incidents last longer: Teams waste time figuring out who’s responsible for an issue.
Standards are inconsistently applied: Without accountability, teams often fall behind on initiatives like security upgrades, cloud migrations, or compliance improvements.
Developer morale declines: When developers are constantly interrupted by urgent fixes and unclear tasks, they lose the autonomy that makes their work enjoyable.
In short, a lack of ownership perpetuates silos, reduces quality, and ultimately slows down the entire organization. Ensuring that every service has clear, actionable ownership is the first step toward unlocking value from your IDP.
1. Increasing developer productivity
By reducing the time developers spend on repetitive tasks—like finding documentation or managing dependencies—an IDP allows them to focus on delivering value.
To better quantify the impact of Cortex in the areas of developer productivity and beyond, we commissioned Forrester Consulting, an independent research firm, to interview Cortex customers and assess the return on investment.
Forrester found that Cortex customers see a 20% improvement in developer productivity, highlighting the measurable impact an IDP can have. With fewer roadblocks, developers can spend more time on high-value work—like building features and improving systems—while the business benefits from faster delivery and greater innovation.
While the 20% improvement in developer productivity is a good point of reference, assessing the value of that improvement is a bit more nuanced.
Organizations measure developer productivity in a variety of ways, often combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights. Common approaches include:
Output-based metrics: Tracking measurable outputs like lines of code written, commits, pull requests, or tickets completed. While these are easy to measure, they don’t always reflect quality or long-term impact.
Cycle time and lead time: Measuring how long it takes to move a task from start to completion, which helps assess efficiency in delivering features or fixes.
DORA metrics: Widely adopted for DevOps performance, these include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate, offering a broader view of productivity and reliability.
Developer experience surveys: Capturing feedback on pain points, workflow friction, and tool effectiveness, which can reveal hidden productivity challenges.
Code quality and maintainability: Using tools like static analysis, test coverage, and bug rates to ensure productivity doesn’t come at the cost of future reliability.
Time spent on value-added work: Assessing how much time developers spend on coding and innovation versus non-coding tasks like hunting for information, fixing issues, or dealing with outdated processes.
For organizations with a firm grasp on current state in any of these approaches in measuring developer productivity, either applying a 20% improvement or a conservative percentage increase helps quantify the impact of the IDP.
But in the absence of an IDP, some of these current state metrics may not be readily accessible.
Measuring IDP’s impact on developer productivity
The foundation of this framework considers the current and future states of the productive development hours. Actual productive coding time for developers can be significantly less than the traditional 40 hours work week due to meetings, context switching, administrative tasks, and other interruptions.
Atlassian suggests that developers spend about 10-15 hours per week coding. Stack Overflow Developer Survey indicates that developers might spend around 20-25 hours per week on actual coding.
You may have an idea of the current state of productivity for your own organization through concrete data, qualitative dev surveys, or through anecdotal findings with developers or managers. For the following method we measure the financial and productivity impact of an IDP using the following formula: average current state of productive development hours + the impact factor.
Impact factor: The impact of an IDP on developer productivity can vary widely depending on an organization’s current state and how they plan to use it. While some teams apply a 20% improvement, as measured by Forrester, others take a more conservative approach, measuring gains as small as 1 hour saved per developer per week or per month, or even just a 5% improvement.
These smaller increments may seem modest, but across a large engineering team, they can translate into significant time and cost savings. The key is recognizing that every organization starts from a different baseline, and even incremental improvements add up to greater focus, faster delivery, and higher overall value.
Not sure where to start? Consider a conservative 5% improvement against an industry benchmark, and adjust as you consider your unique use cases.
Value of developer hours gained per year
Future productivity - current productivity = productivity gain
Whether it’s a 5% improvement or a more substantial 20% gain, the impact of an IDP compounds over time, unlocking developer capacity and driving measurable business outcomes. By reducing friction and streamlining workflows, organizations can enable their teams to focus on what matters most—building, innovating, and delivering value faster.
2. Accelerate the pace of new developer onboarding
Developer onboarding is a critical yet often overlooked part of the engineering lifecycle. One of the biggest challenges is the time it takes for new developers to ramp up and become fully productive. On average, it can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months for a new developer to contribute at their full potential, as they navigate unfamiliar tools, processes, and systems.
This lengthy ramp-up period is often exacerbated by scattered documentation, unclear ownership, and a lack of streamlined access to the resources they need. Without a clear, efficient onboarding process, new developers can spend more time searching for answers and less time contributing meaningful work, which impacts team velocity and slows innovation.
Using an IDP provides new hires with access to tools, processes and documentation, while giving management and HR greater insight into how they are integrating with the team and settling in.
The Cortex Catalog gives new developers easy access to essential information—like documentation, dependencies, ownership details, and even external resources—that they need to reference frequently. By consolidating this information in one place, the Catalog helps developers become self-sufficient faster, reducing the need for constant requests and minimizing that “newbie” feeling. With Cortex, time from hire to engineer’s first commit can be closer to one week, with access to tools, processes, documentation, and prioritized action items from day 1.
Scorecards further support onboarding by clearly outlining expectations for a developer’s role. They define short-term and long-term goals, set responsibilities, and can include onboarding-specific targets alongside broader team objectives. This clarity not only accelerates ramp-up time but also helps new developers feel focused and motivated as they navigate their new environment.
So how do you assess the impact of an IDP for new developer onboarding?
Measuring IDP’s impact on developer onboarding
If onboarding isn’t as smooth as it could be and hiring is on your radar, you may want to review the impact of developer onboarding as you assess the total impact of an IDP.
The important benchmarks needed for consideration are the number of developers you plan to hire and the time it takes for new developers to become productive, which can be measured by the time to their first commit (or other methods).
In the following example, let’s consider an organization that plans to hire 50 engineers over the next year.
Value of dev hours gained per year through onboarding faster
Streamlining access to information and setting clear expectations can help organizations turn onboarding from a slow, frustrating process into a smooth path for new developers to contribute confidently and quickly.
3. Accelerating migration and modernization initiatives
Accelerating migration and modernization initiatives is a top priority for many engineering teams, but it’s rarely a straightforward process. Whether moving from a monolith to microservices, upgrading infrastructure, or adopting new tools, these initiatives often face challenges like incomplete visibility, unclear ownership, and manual processes that slow progress.
Without a centralized way to track and manage these efforts, teams can struggle to align on priorities, identify blockers, and ensure consistency across services.
An IDP simplifies this complexity, providing the visibility, automation, and structure needed to drive these initiatives forward efficiently.
Measuring an IDP's impact on migrations and modernization
A large-scale migration, such as moving from a monolith to microservices or upgrading critical infrastructure, can typically take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years or more, depending on the size and complexity of the organization.
Let’s look at the impact for just one large scale migration.
To assess the impact, we could consider a couple different “impact factors.” For example, Forrester found through conversations with Cortex customers that the Cortex IDP reduces the overall time required to deploy new software, system upgrades, or new features by 25%, significantly improving ability to drive new revenue.
Many Cortex customers experience even greater acceleration. For example, in the case of LetsGetChecked’s Kubernetes migration, using Cortex helped them cut their projected timeline by almost a third, from 24 months down to 16. Migrating sooner allowed them to capture savings and productivity benefits 8 months earlier than expected.
Getting a migration completed faster is great—but how do you assess the financial impact? If you have a value assigned to the migration — for example, if it will allow you to focus on a revenue-generating feature, or if completing the migration allows you to reduce cloud costs, you can easily extrapolate the value of completing said migration more quickly.
Another way to assess the value is in looking at the resources assigned to complete the migration. Many organizations assign Technical Program Managers (TPMs) to oversee migration and modernization initiatives, ensuring timelines are met, dependencies are managed, and teams stay aligned.
However, these projects are often resource-intensive, requiring significant coordination and manual oversight. By leveraging automation through an IDP, teams can reduce the time TPMs spend on tracking progress, chasing updates, and managing manual workflows. An IDP centralizes visibility into migration status, ownership, and dependencies, while automating repetitive tasks—like identifying services that need upgrades or notifying teams about pending actions. This not only accelerates the overall migration process but can also reduce the number of TPMs needed to manage these initiatives, freeing up resources for other high-impact projects.
With automated scorecards and notifications to the right teams to complete a given migration, the number of TPM hours required to complete the migration in total is drastically reduced (e.g., many of the manual 10 hours per week per TPM is now automated). But, let’s just consider putting time back into a TPMs work week when the migration is completed.
Whether you're managing multiple migrations, a mix of large- and small-scale initiatives, or operating with or without dedicated TPMs, an IDP provides the flexibility to adapt to your unique needs—streamlining processes, automating workflows, and ensuring every migration delivers its intended value, faster.
4. Automating production readiness reviews
Production readiness reviews are a critical step to ensure services meet reliability, security, and compliance standards before going live, but the process is often manual and time-consuming. Teams typically rely on spreadsheets, checklists, and meetings to verify readiness, which introduces inefficiencies, delays, and the risk of human error.
Tracking progress manually also makes it difficult to maintain consistency across teams, especially as services scale and requirements evolve. Without automation, engineering leaders can struggle to enforce standards or identify gaps, leaving services vulnerable to production issues that could have been avoided.
Automating production readiness reviews saves significant time and resources, allowing teams to focus on revenue-generating projects instead of chasing teams and stakeholders that haven’t met the prescribed organizational standards for releases.
Measuring the financial impact of an IDP on migration/modernization initiatives
Whether you have a TPM dedicated to complete each readiness check or it’s a team effort with manual reviews, status update meetings, etc, the number of hours per readiness check and the number of new features/services planned is a good starting point for assessing the impact of an IDP in the area of automating production readiness checks. This framework could also be used if regularly occurring, manual health checks take place, like quarterly security or compliance audits.
Automating production readiness reviews is just the beginning—whether it’s audits, health checks, or other critical assessments, an IDP ensures teams can consistently meet standards, reduce risk, and keep systems running smoothly.
Identifying your key impact areas
While IDPs offer benefits across multiple areas, it’s essential to focus on the metrics that align with your organization’s priorities. We highlighted just a few of the benefits above, but those are just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a few other benefits for which you can calculate the financial impact, especially if you are already collecting data for these metrics:
resolving incidents faster with clear ownership and context
reducing the frequency of incidents in total
speeding time to market for revenue-generating features
reducing team lead / manager time in running reports and chasing team members for status updates
reduction in MTTR
increase in deployment frequency
Need support in assessing impact?
The right IDP is an enabler of operational efficiency, innovation, and growth. By quantifying the various top-of-mind impact areas, you can build a compelling case that resonates with all internal decision-makers.
Ready to assess the ROI of an IDP for your organization? We have team members ready to help you understand and calculate the potential impact. Feel free to contact our team using the form here.
