I'm building an internal portal for engineering teams, what should I include first?

For an internal engineering portal, start with the pieces that remove friction every day. The best first version is usually the one that helps engineers find, understand, and ship things faster.

What to include first

1. A clear home page

Make it the “front door” for engineers:

• What the portal is for
• Links to the most-used tools
• Announcements or incidents
• Quick search or command palette
• Team ownership or on-call info

2. Service catalog

This is often the highest-value feature. Include for each service:

• Name and purpose
• Owner/team
• Repo link
• Runtime or environment info
• Dependencies
• On-call rotation
• Dashboards and runbooks
• Deployment method
• SLA/SLO if relevant

3. Searchable documentation

Engineers need fast answers. Add:

• Architecture docs
• Onboarding docs
• Runbooks
• Deployment guides
• API docs
• Conventions and standards
• Internal FAQs

4. Team and ownership directory

Make it easy to know who owns what:

• Team name
• Members
• Slack channel
• Manager or tech lead
• Escalation path
• Areas of responsibility

5. Operational links

Centralize the stuff people always hunt for:

• Logs
• Metrics dashboards
• Traces
• CI/CD pipelines
• Incident tools
• Status page
• Feature flag platform

6. Onboarding section

This saves time for new hires and transfers:

• Setup instructions
• Access requests
• Local dev setup
• First tasks
• System overview
• Helpful contacts

7. Runbooks and incident support

If the portal helps during outages, it becomes indispensable:

• Common failure modes
• Triage steps
• Recovery steps
• Escalation contacts
• Postmortem templates

Good “first release” scope

If you want a practical MVP, build:

1. Home page
2. Service catalog
3. Search
4. Team ownership directory
5. Links to dashboards/runbooks/repos

That’s enough to deliver immediate value without overbuilding.

What to avoid at first

Don’t start with:

• Complex workflows
• Heavy custom permissions
• Fancy analytics
• Too many integrations
• A fully custom CMS unless needed

A simple prioritization rule

Build features that answer these questions first:

• “What services do we have?”
• “Who owns this?”
• “Where is the docs/runbook/dashboard?”
• “How do I deploy/debug this?”
• “Who do I contact?”

If you want, I can also help you design:

• a recommended MVP information architecture,
• a database/schema for the portal,
• or a feature roadmap for v1 → v2.