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.
To simplify how teams can quickly identify service owners, and the organization can keep their teams accountable in a setting of empowered product teams that gives a lot of decision freedom into the individual teams, a solution was needed.
In this journey, Cortex came into play on a three legged mission: Simplify ownership, foster transparency on engineering excellence, and encourage behavior change through scorecards. Ultimately, we managed to
Increase developer confidence by 43% by identifying service owners (35% to 50%+ in DevEx surveys)
Eliminate manual bottlenecks by shifting license requests and onboarding to self-service
Accelerate strategic initiatives through automated, real-time tracking instead of manual spreadsheet hunting
Enhance AI-powered development with natural language queries for ownership and system data
The challenge: Innovation without infrastructure
Vista's micro frontend transformation delivered exactly what they wanted: greater team autonomy and faster development cycles. But this success created a new set of challenges. The sheer number of services made ownership a moving target, and critical documentation was often left behind when teams shifted responsibilities.
“If a service went down, we struggled to identify what the cause was and who owned it. Teams ultimately found themselves in a silo.”
Chris Ramsay, Principal DevOps Engineer, Vista
Developers found themselves wading through Slack archaeology or confluence pages just to identify who owned what, wasting valuable time that could have been spent on shipping features. This sprawl created critical delay in triage, and fostered intransparency on accountability on all levels. The team needed more than visibility, they needed a system that could automatically stay accurate as their organization evolved.
The solution: Bringing order to engineering with Cortex
The Developer Productivity team evaluated building their own platform and the competitor landscape. They needed a SaaS platform that provided immediate value without maintenance overhead of self-build. Cortex quickly emerged as the clear choice, transforming their daily operations through three core capabilities.
1. Service catalog: Building a foundation of truth
Unlike top-down mandates that often face resistance, the adoption of Cortex's Service Catalog was driven by developers themselves. They were feeling the acute pain of service sprawl and were eager for a solution. The Developer Productivity team capitalized on this by reducing entry hurtles and making it easy to get started with a simple, additive process.
They began proactively pre-populate cortex.yaml file to other teams Git repositories to establish baseline ownership. Once the initial catalog was populated and its value became obvious, they layered on more requirements, bulk linking NewRelic records with Cortex services, defining default service tiers where absent and pulling on-call schedules from PagerDuty. The result was immediate: less confusion, faster incident response, and fewer interruptions. Because the platform directly solved a problem everyone was experiencing, teams began adding metadata voluntarily, creating a virtuous cycle of adoption.
"We didn't force it. Teams added more data on their own because they saw the benefit."
Chris Ramsay, Principal DevOps Engineer, Vista
2. Scorecards: From initiative chaos to clear Progress
While the Service Catalog solved the immediate pain of discoverability, Scorecards emerged as a surprise hit that supported existing, more manual or decentralized methods on how Vista managed cross-team initiatives. Chris admitted he initially "glazed over the scorecards," but it quickly became one of Cortex's most valuable features.
For the first time, product teams and leadership had a real-time, comprehensive view of engineering programs that spanned dozens of teams. The previous method of tracking progress, chasing updates in Slack and spreadsheets, was replaced with a single, authoritative dashboard. They've used Scorecards for everything from tracking library upgrades and Distributed tracing adoption to more creative applications, like ensuring teams rotate their security keys on time.
"We've used Scorecards for everything from library upgrades to security tracking. Project managers love it. It's the clearest way to see who's done the work and who hasn't."
Chris Ramsay, Principal DevOps Engineer, Vista
3. Workflows: Self-service at scale
With a small Developer Productivity team supporting hundreds of engineers, manual processes were a significant bottleneck. Automation wasn't just a nice-to-have; it was essential to initiate a turnaround. Using Cortex Workflows, Chris' team began automating their most common developer requests and turning them into self-service actions.
Instead of filing a ticket and waiting, engineers can now provision their own licenses for tools like GitHub Copilot, PagerDuty, and New Relic with a single click. This shift eliminated a constant stream of interruptions and empowered our engineering force to get what they need without the friction of a traditional ticketing system.
"It's so much easier to tell people 'go to Cortex' than 'go to this New Relic page and sign in, or go to this Slack channel and ask someone.'"
Chris Ramsay, Principal DevOps Engineer, Vista
Innovation edge: AI-Powered developer experience
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 implementation goes beyond simple queries. Chris's team together with the AI platform team integrated internal documentation systems and AWS documentation alongside Cortex, creating a comprehensive knowledge base accessible through AI. They're even exploring "daisy chaining", combining Cortex ownership data with GitLab examples and API documentation to enable AI-assisted development workflows.
"This is one of the coolest things we've built. Being able to query Cortex through ChatGPT or Slack and get ownership or repo links instantly is game-changing."
Chris Ramsay, Principal DevOps Engineer, Vista
Vista's MCP rollout has been successful that Chris is now focusing on company-wide SLO definition and tracking, all managed through Cortex service entities and measured via AI-accessible dashboards.
A single pane of glass for engineering leadership
For an engineering organization with hundreds of engineers distributed across 59 teams and multiple time zones, effective leadership requires a level of visibility that spreadsheets and outdated org charts can't provide. Before Cortex, tracking company-wide initiatives have been far from easy. Cortex provided the central source of truth they needed, transforming how they operate in three key ways:
Real-time initiative tracking. Leaders use Scorecards to measure strategic program delivery—from key rotations to security compliance—without hunting through spreadsheets or manual reports. Cortex automatically surfaces gaps and flags risk areas.
Always-accurate ownership data. Integration with HR systems keeps team and ownership information synchronized as employees move, change roles, or onboard. No more outdated org charts or guessing games.
Distributed team clarity. In a remote-first environment spanning multiple time zones, leadership always has an accurate view of who owns what across the entire engineering organization.
A stronger foundation for future innovation
With a solid operational foundation in place, the developer productivity team is now leveraging Cortex to drive the next wave of engineering excellence at Vista. Their focus is shifting from establishing visibility to enabling higher-level strategic initiatives.
Driving operational excellence with SLOs
Now that every service has a clear owner and tier defined in Cortex, Vista is rolling out a company-wide SLO initiative. Using Cortex as the system of record, they can strategically target tier-one services first and track adoption progress with Scorecards. For the first time, this will give leadership a standardized, aggregate view of system health across their entire distributed architecture.
Pioneering AI-Driven development
Building on their early success with the Model Context Protocol, the team is exploring more advanced, "daisy-chained" AI workflows. The vision is to create an AI assistant that can query Cortex for service ownership, pull the relevant API documentation from internal systems, and even find implementation examples in GitLab—dramatically accelerating development and onboarding.
Ready to transform your engineering operations? See how Cortex can help your team achieve similar results. Book a demo to learn more.
