Last week, hundreds of engineering leaders, SREs, platform teams, and developers joined us for Summer Scoop 2025, our biggest launch event yet.
The way that we think about our product development at Cortex revolves around all the different types of users who are in our product every day.
From executives focused on improving team productivity, to SREs and platform engineers building reliable systems, to developers trying to figure out what to prioritize, our recent launches and last week’s event are all focused on solving real problems for every person in the engineering organization.
Solving the ownership trap at scale
Jonathan, VP of Engineering at Cortex, introduced our new AI Ownership Prediction capabilities, making it easy to identify and verify owners across thousands of services in just minutes. Ownership is the foundation for any improvement initiative, and without it, you can’t drive accountability, run initiatives, or respond effectively during incidents.
Jonathan demoed how Cortex automatically infers ownership using AI and makes it simple for teams to validate and verify, all from one place.
→ Read more: Solve service ownership in minutes with Cortex's AI prediction model
What’s new in Eng Intelligence: Velocity Dashboard & Metrics Explorer
Madison, Lead Product Manager at Cortex, introduced the new Velocity Dashboard, the first in a series of out-of-the-box Engineering Intelligence reports designed to turn raw data into actionable insights.
The Velocity Dashboard, along with the Metrics Explorer, helps you understand why your cycle time is what it is, breaks down each stage of the pull request lifecycle, highlights where delays occur, and correlates metrics like PR size, review time, and PR success rate, making it easier to pinpoint bottlenecks and drive improvement. With built in connections to Scorecards and Initiatives, Cortex makes it simple to action on insights and measure impact over time.
And, Madison unpacked why Engineering Intelligence belongs in the IDP. It’s the only place where your metrics and service context come together. Cortex already understands your teams, services, ownership, dependencies, and tooling, so the insights you get aren’t just numbers, they’re actionable and tied to real entities in your system. This makes it easier to operationalize improvements, drive accountability, and track progress; all in one platform.
→ Read more: Turn data into insights with Cortex’s new Engineering Intelligence tools
A Homepage for everyone
When we first launched what we called the Developer Homepage, our goal was to give developers a centralized view of their daily work: pull requests, reviews, Jira tickets, on-call schedules, and anything else they needed to stay on top of. It was the first of its kind.
But platform teams, SREs, engineering leaders and beyond rely on Cortex day to day, not just developers. The question we asked ourselves was: How do we build an experience that surfaces what matters, based on who you are and what you're accountable for?
That question led to a complete rethinking of the homepage experience.
Ganesh, CTO at Cortex, unveiled the new Engineering Homepage, built for everyone from ICs to VPs.
If you’re a developer, you’ll see:
PRs that need your review, and which ones are getting stale
Upcoming on-call shifts and escalation paths
Tickets due soon
Scorecards like production readiness and service maturity for services you own
Recent workflows like deploys or new service creation
If you’re a tech lead or manager, you’ll see:
Rollups of your team’s performance across scorecards and initiatives
Reports with the state of services and infrastructure you’re responsible for
A toggle to view child teams and broader org context
And if you’re further up the org chart, like a VP or CTO, the Engineering Homepage surfaces what’s happening across every team you oversee. Whether it’s scorecard leaderboards or migration progress, it’s all visible in one place.
→ Read more: Engineering Homepage: See what matters most
Workflows
Workflows are a way to build self-service experiences inside of Cortex, way beyond scaffolding or bootstrapping new services.
Cortex Workflows combine automation, notifications, and human-in-the-loop steps to help teams roll out developer self-service in a way that’s structured, measurable, and tied directly to your goals.
Ganesh also showed off what’s new in Cortex Workflows, including:
200+ and counting built-in core & integration blocks
JavaScript blocks with sandboxed JS execution, including support for API calls
Native GitOps for workflow management
A new run UI that gives engineers a seamless “wizard”-like experience
Workflows enable platform teams to build powerful self-service experiences without sacrificing flexibility or maintainability.
→ Read more: Developer self-service made easy with Cortex Workflows
Celebrating engineering leadership
We closed out the event by recognizing Hari Babu from H&R Block with the Engineering Excellence Award. Hari’s work exemplifies what great engineering leadership looks like—moving fast, driving impact, and aligning technology to business goals. We’re proud to support leaders like Hari who are pushing their teams and organizations forward.
Even more to explore
Cortex has recently shipped so many new features, we couldn’t squeeze them all into the Summer Scoop Launch Party live event!
Here’s a few other announcements unveiled as part of the launch week:
→ Introducing Entity Relationships: Define your data model
→ Integrations just got stronger: Introducing the Cortex Tech Partnership Program
→ Easily and quickly bring all your data into Cortex with the Axon Framework
→ Introducing Cortex Academy: Your destination for Engineering Excellence
What’s next?
If you're interested in trying out ownership predictions, the velocity dashboard, the new homepage, or any of the other many new features we showed off during the launch event, sign up at cortex.io/beta.
If you’re ready to take the next step, we’ve created a Fast Track IDP Program just for Summer Scoop attendees. It’s a guided, low-lift pilot that gets you up and running in just one week.
You’ll walk away with a working IDP and everything you need to evaluate Cortex. You can sign up here: https://cortex.io/fast-track
And lastly, mark your calendars. IDPCON is back this year, and it’s going to be even bigger. The big event is October 9, 2025 in New York City. Want a sweet discount on your ticket? You can still register for the Summer Scoop Launch Party live event to watch the recording and grab the special discount code toward the end of the event.
Learn more and register here: IDPCON.com
Summer Scoop 2025 was just a glimpse of what’s ahead. Everything we shared, from AI-powered ownership to actionable visibility with Engineering Intelligence reflects our commitment to helping engineering teams do their best work.
