Dev Tools That Developers Love: Building, Supporting and Sunsetting Internals

Internal platforms, CI/CD pipelines, GraphQL gateways, job search APIs – the hidden tools behind every product release. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Bridget, Nik and Reyna go deep on developer tooling done right: treating engineers as real customers, scaling support without burning out, and knowing when it’s finally time to turn a beloved tool off. In this episode, we explore: • How to treat engineers as real customers – using pairing, one-on-one interviews, surveys, PR metrics and “apathy as a signal” to understand how teams actually use your platform, where they struggle, and what “easy to contribute” really looks like for something like SEEK’s GraphQL layer. • How to scale support and adoption without burning out – from guinea-pig teams and training classes to champions embedded in product squads, dedicated Slack support channels, docs-as-part-of-your-MVP, FAQs built from repeated questions and the dream where your community answers most questions before you even see them. • When (and how) to sunset a tool – the story of SEEK’s SQS Move utility being replaced by native AWS features, announcing deprecations, brownouts, injecting latency to “see who screams”, handing ownership to the last remaining team and navigating the politics and emotions of telling people their favourite tool has to die. If you’re in platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, data, API or general IT and care about developer experience, incident risk and getting more value from the tools behind your stack, this episode will give you practical patterns you can steal for your own org. 🔔 Follow the SEEK Bytes podcast so you never miss a new episode