Part 1 of 3 ·
Building a Design System Across Teams
How we built a shared design system for all IONOS customer frontends — and what it took to make UX and engineering actually share ownership of it.
Series
Engineering Leadership in Practice
Three large technical changes — a shared design system, a frontend team merger, a monolith split — that each succeeded on organisational grounds rather than technical ones.
A design system, a team merger and a monolith decomposition look like architecture problems. None of them were. In each case the technical plan was the easy part, and the outcome was decided by ownership, incentives and whether people wanted the thing to work.
These three posts predate the AI writing on this site and hold up without it. They are the closest thing I have to a record of what engineering leadership actually consists of: getting two disciplines to share a codebase, merging teams without breaking the ones you merged, and pulling a twenty-year-old monolith apart while delivery keeps running.
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Part 2 of 3 ·
Merging Frontend Teams Without Breaking Them
When merging frontend teams, the hardest part isn't the tech stack — it's getting teams to actually want to make it work.
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Part 3 of 3 ·
Splitting a 20+ Year Old Monolith
How we decomposed a decades-old monolithic application into focused services — without derailing ongoing project delivery.