Introduction

When Robert Keane founded Vista in 1995, he sold desktop publishing software directly to customers. Fast-forward nearly three decades, and Vista has become a digital marketing powerhouse under the VistaPrint brand, helping millions of small businesses "own the now" with expertly designed custom marketing materials.

But Vista's remarkable transformation from desktop software company to global digital platform created a classic engineering challenge: their successful replatformization towards micro-frontend architecture. Vista's engineering team had successfully decomposed their monolith into hundreds of distributed services, but they were facing the tradeoff towards microservice communication overhead.

Hundreds of distributed services meant ownership was a moving target. Critical documentation fell behind as teams shifted responsibilities. When incidents struck, engineers waded through Slack archaeology and stale Confluence pages just to find the right person, wasting time that should have been spent on resolution. Cross-team initiatives were tracked through spreadsheets and manual check-ins that were out of date almost as soon as they were written.

These weren't software problems. They were operational problems. The kind that differentiate engineering organizations that scale gracefully from those that crumble under their own complexity.

Vista needed more than another tool. They needed an Engineering Operations platform. So they turned to Cortex.

Key wins:

• 1

  Increase developer confidence by 43% by identifying service owners (35% to 50%+ in DevEx surveys)

• 2

  Eliminate manual bottlenecks by shifting license requests and onboarding to self-service

• 3

  Accelerate strategic initiatives through automated, real-time tracking instead of manual spreadsheet hunting

• 4

  Enhance AI-powered development with natural language queries for ownership and system data

The solution: Bringing order to engineering with Cortex

Vista evaluated building their own internal platform and reviewed the competitive landscape. They needed a solution that delivered immediate value without the maintenance overhead of a homegrown system. Cortex emerged as the clear choice, giving Vista the foundation to run engineering as a cohesive function across the organization. Cortex transformed Vista’s daily operations through three core capabilities:

1. Service catalog: Building a foundation of truth

The first imperative of any Engineering Operations function is clarity: making it easier to see and make decisions. Vista started by using Cortex's Service Catalog to create a single, authoritative source of truth for their entire engineering estate.

Rather than mandating adoption from the top down, Vista's Developer Productivity team met engineers where the pain was sharpest. They pre-populated cortex.yaml files across Git repositories to establish baseline ownership, then progressively layered in richer data: New Relic records, default service tiers, and PagerDuty on-call schedules. Because the catalog directly solved a problem engineers were already feeling, teams began contributing metadata voluntarily, creating a virtuous cycle of adoption.

The result was immediate: faster incident response, less confusion, and fewer interruptions across the organization. Developer confidence in identifying service owners increased by over 43% - jumping from 35% to over 50% as reflected in DevEx surveys.

2. Scorecards: From initiative chaos to clear progress

The second imperative of Engineering Operations is using data to take action, establishing shared standards and tracking progress against them continuously, not just at quarterly review time.

This is where Cortex Scorecards became a defining capability for Vista. They quickly became one of the most valued features across the organization, not just for the Developer Productivity team, but for engineering leaders and project managers who needed real-time accountability across dozens of teams.

Scorecards replaced the manual, spreadsheet-driven process of tracking cross-team initiatives with a single, authoritative dashboard. Vista applied them to library upgrades, distributed tracing adoption, security key rotation, and more, etc., transforming strategic programs from slow-moving manual efforts into automated, real-time tracking.

For engineering leaders overseeing 59 teams across multiple time zones, Scorecards brought something that spreadsheets could never deliver: always-on visibility into the operational health of the entire organization, with gaps and risk areas surfaced automatically.

3. Workflows: Self-service at scale

With a small Developer Productivity team supporting hundreds of engineers, manual workflows were unsustainable. Using Cortex Workflows, Vista converted their most common developer requests into self-service actions. Engineers were now able to provision licenses for tools like GitHub Copilot, PagerDuty, and New Relic with a single click, eliminating a constant stream of tickets and interruptions that had made the Developer Productivity team a bottleneck rather than an enabler.

Engineering Operations meets AI

Vista became an early adopter of Cortex's Model Context Protocol (MCP), making them one of the first companies to integrate Cortex data directly into Vista’s internal MCP Ecosystem surfaced on librechat and their IDE. Engineers can now ask natural language questions like "Who owns this service?" and get instant responses without leaving their development environment.

The team went further, pairing Cortex ownership data with internal documentation systems and AWS documentation to create a comprehensive knowledge base accessible through AI. They're now exploring "daisy-chaining": combining Cortex data with GitLab examples and API documentation to power AI-assisted development workflows that dramatically accelerate onboarding and feature development.

This is Engineering Operations at its most forward-looking: using AI not just to answer questions, but to embed operational intelligence into the daily workflows of every engineer in the organization.

Conclusion

With a strong operational foundation in place, Vista is pushing into the next phase of Engineering Operations maturity. They're rolling out a company-wide SLO initiative. By using Cortex as the system of record to strategically target tier-one services and track adoption through Scorecards, for the first time, leadership will have a standardized, aggregate view of system health across their entire distributed architecture.

Alongside this, Vista is deepening their AI-driven Engineering Operations capability, exploring advanced workflows that connect Cortex ownership data with internal APIs and code examples, giving every engineer an intelligent operational assistant embedded in how they already work.

Vista's story is a demonstration of what becomes possible when engineering organizations treat Engineering Operations as a core discipline. How you build is a key factor in the success of what you build.

Ready to transform your engineering operations? See how Cortex can help your team achieve similar results. Book a demo to learn more.