You can’t improve what you can’t see. And at scale, visibility often gets lost in complexity.
Engineering teams everywhere are shipping faster, adopting new technologies, and managing more complex systems than ever before. But with that growth comes a challenge: How do you keep your tech fundamentals strong—security, reliability, cost efficiency, operational excellence—without slowing down innovation?
At Target Tech, we faced that same challenge. As our technology ecosystem grew across hundreds of technology products, thousands of engineers and millions of assets, we needed a clearer, more unified way to understand our engineering health.
Are we using infrastructure efficiently? Are we relying on outdated components? How do we improve reliability without adding unnecessary overhead? These questions shaped our approach—and led to the creation of the Infrastructure Showback Hub, or Infra Showback.
Infra Showback is a framework that gives teams real-time insights into how products align with core technical best practices. It makes engineering health visible, measurable, and actionable at scale. It also sparked something bigger: a cultural shift in how our teams think about engineering excellence.
While Infra Showback was built for Target, the challenges it solves are universal across the tech industry. By sharing our approach, we hope to offer a practical path for others working to strengthen their foundations and scale with clarity.
The Industry Problem—and Target’s Opportunity
As organizations grow, so does the complexity of their technology ecosystems. Managing engineering fundamentals across teams and portfolios at scale introduces significant challenges:
- Fragmented insights – No single view of security, reliability, cost, or tech debt makes prioritization difficult.
- Scaling alignment – As engineering teams expand, it gets increasingly difficult to align their technical efforts to broader technology guidelines.
- Decision-making complexity – It’s challenging to extract actionable insights across many teams.
- Balancing innovation with excellence – Innovating at scale requires systematic tracking and continuous improvement to focus on best practices.
At Target Tech, we encountered similar challenges as we scaled. Our technology landscape spans millions of hardware and software assets across on-premises data centers, public cloud environments, and edge locations, such as stores and distribution centers.
But we saw an opportunity. If we could create a unified, systematic approach to measuring and improving tech fundamentals, we could increase visibility, and drive better alignment with organizational goals.
The Solution: Infra Showback
What if every product had a health score?
That’s the idea behind Infra Showback. By leveraging trusted data, it provides actionable insights and a score for the health of technology products and their infrastructure usage. This enables teams to identify gaps and drive improvements in tech fundamentals—at scale.
We took inspiration from our earlier success with the Security Product Intelligence Platform (Sec-Pi)—a custom-built, patented tool that empowers developers to improve their product's security posture through an at-a-glance view of relevant, actionable security data. It showed the power that comes from embedding cultural transformation into engineering workflows.
With Infra Showback, we applied the same principles—starting with stability, tech debt, and cost efficiency, given their significant impact on our operational excellence and business alignment.
Tech Fundamentals: Where We Started
Infra Showback focuses on three key capabilities, or dimensions, of tech fundamentals:
- Cost: Offers real-time insights into infrastructure usage to help teams optimize resources across public and private cloud environments. It also provides guidance on using the right services in the right place to improve cost and performance
- Tech Debt: Highlights unsupported or outdated software components—third-party, first-party and applications—helping teams prioritize remediation efforts, reduce tech debt and long-term risks.
- Stability: Measures reliability and operational maturity across areas like production readiness, change management, incident response and production code management. It ensures that teams are building resilient, high-performing systems.
Capability Composition
Each capability is composed of different categories to organize the guidance and provide weightage for scores. Each category contains multiple topics where points are awarded for various behaviors or outcomes. Each topic has one or more rules to determine which assets need attention. The table below gives examples of these:
How Infra Showback Works
Infra Showback is a comprehensive framework, powered by a centralized data platform, with these core functionalities:
Score
At the core of Infra Showback is its scoring system. It aggregates key metrics into a single, intuitive score per product, offering:
- A clear snapshot of health in the dimensions of stability, tech debt, or cost efficiency.
- Insights to compare products, identify improvements, and make strategic decisions.
By simplifying complex technical data, the score enables teams and leaders to quickly assess system health.
Actionable Insights
Infra Showback delivers actionable insights that help teams:
- Identify improvements in stability, tech debt and cost.
- Prioritize improvements based on impact.
- Take meaningful, data-driven steps toward continuous improvement.
Portfolio Reporting
For leaders, Infra Showback provides a portfolio-wide view of their technology landscape. This feature enables:
- Greater alignment between technical initiatives and business objectives.
- Identification of systemic risks and opportunities, allowing for more strategic resource allocation.
Showback Architecture
The Infra Showback architecture consists of four core components that enable its key functionality.
These components work in a structured order as outlined below:
1. Core Data: Infra Showback consumes read-only copies of core data sourced from other systems via the IT Data Platform (ITDP), ensuring access to trusted, high-quality datasets. (ITDP is detailed later in this blog.)
2. Insights Engine: Transforms core data into insights—the fundamental building blocks of the framework—by applying predefined rules and configurations.
3. Scoring Engine: Converts complex technical data into an aggregated health index score, providing a simplified—yet comprehensive—measure of a product’s technical health.
4. Interfaces (Graphical and Programmable): Provide users access to scores, insights, and reports via the Infra Showback Hub UI and APIs, enabling both interactive visualization and programmatic integration.
Driving Engineering Culture Change: People, Processes, and Data
A technology platform and rigid policies alone will not transform engineering culture. It takes a mindset shift, and Infra Showback has been a catalyst for that transformation because it’s grounded in people, processes and data. It’s about empowering engineers, rather than enforcing compliance.
People: A Developer-First Approach
Transformation in engineering culture starts with developers and engineers, who are at the heart of technology decision-making. We designed Infra Showback to be developer-friendly, ensuring it provides value without disrupting innovation.
- Actionable insights over checklists – Infra Showback translates engineering fundamentals into clear, data-driven insights, allowing teams to improve their products without adding extra overhead.
- A trusted guide, not a compliance tool – Unlike traditional governance models, Infra Showback acts as a guide by offering specific recommendations.
- Intrinsic motivation over enforcement – Studies show that intrinsic motivation—learning, mastery, and recognition—drives better adoption than fear of penalties. Instead of using chargeback models, Infra Showback operates on a showback model, where teams see scores and targets that encourage engagement rather than resistance.
Process: Scaling with Structure
To scale Infra Showback, we took a structured rollout approach:
- Metric and Rule Evaluation – We identified reliable, high-quality data points that could programmatically feed into Infra Showback, minimizing manual effort and ensuring accuracy.
- Pilot and Iteration – We started with a few select teams and made refinements based on their feedback before scaling up.
- Continuous Engagement and Awareness – We ensured strong adoption by showing value through regular demonstrations, roadshows and communication campaigns.
Data: Foundation of Trust and Reliability
For Infra Showback to be effective, it had to be built on trusted, high-quality data because engineers and leaders act only when they have confidence in the insights. That’s why it’s powered by the IT Data Platform (ITDP), a centralized and governed foundation that aggregates data from nearly every major technology system across the enterprise. With its robust governance and data-quality framework, ITDP ensures that Infra Showback delivers accurate, reliable, and actionable insights.
Measuring the Impact
Infra Showback is more than a scorecard, it spurs action. By putting insights into the hands of our engineers, they’re able to make informed decisions to improve Target Tech’s technology products. Today, hundreds of products are actively scored and evaluated.
Some examples of success:
- By applying FinOps practices and linking infrastructure cost to business outcomes, one business unit was able to reduce its cost per online order by 33% over four years.
- In the days following our pilot release, Infra Showback enabled one early adopter team to quickly identify wasted resources in misconfigured services—either missing autoscaling or mistakenly left running—resulting in significant annual savings from just one application.
- During the pilot phase, we observed:
- 10% of products significantly reduced tech debt risk.
- 12% of products significantly improved stability posture.
This success reinforced the power of data-driven engineering decisions. Infra Showback is now scaling this approach across Target Tech, extending its impact to all business functions.
What’s Next
As Infra Showback evolves, we’re focused on expanding its impact through the following:
- Seamless integration with developers’ platforms: Infra Showback insights will be embedded into the Target Application Platform (TAP), where developers build and deploy apps. This ensures that insights, score, and GenAI-powered guidance (such as "Chat with my Insights") are available within the same context as applications being deployed, eliminating the need to switch tools and making it easier for developers to act on insights in real time.
- Agentic Automation: Enable the acceleration and automation of insights implementation through agentic AI.
- Scaling FinOps: As we adopt newer technologies such as Agentic AI and GenAI, we will apply FinOps to them
Bringing It All Together
Driving changes in engineering culture don’t happen overnight. It requires an intentional approach across people, processes and data. Our experience with Infra Showback provided these key lessons:
- Empower engineers, don’t enforce compliance
- Provide data-driven insights instead of checklists
- Build on a foundation of trusted data to drive confidence and adoption
Key Takeaways for the Industry
For organizations seeking to embed tech fundamentals into their engineering culture, here’s what helped us:
- Embed tech fundamentals into engineering culture: A scoring and insights framework like Showback helps drive alignment and accountability.
- Prioritize data quality: Centralizing data and ensuring its quality through robust governance is essential for trusted and actionable insights.
- Scale gradually: Start with a pilot phase, gather feedback, and refine the approach to ensure a successful rollout across the organization.
- Empower developers: Adopt a developer-first approach by providing clear, prioritized, and actionable insights rather than burdening teams with compliance mandates and checklists.
Infra Showback is not just a tool: It’s a strategy for building better software, stronger teams, and a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. And it’s a strategy any organization can adopt.