One platform, seven brands, four years.
The long engagement that taught me the rest: a reusable commerce platform serving seven global brands, where I arrived as a developer and left leading one of the two core teams.
THE SITUATION
Seven brands were meant to share one platform, but “shared” had never been defined. Each brand had quietly forked behaviour into its own configuration until nobody could say what the core actually guaranteed — and every core change became a negotiation with seven stakeholders.
WHAT I DID
- Drew a hard line between platform core and brand-specific extension, and moved the accumulated exceptions to the right side of it.
- Built the review and release practices for our team — they were picked up by the other teams on the programme within a year.
- Mentored developers into ownership of subsystems so the knowledge stopped living in three people’s heads.
- Took the technical track over people management when offered both, and stayed close to the code.
WHAT CHANGED
Core changes stopped requiring seven approvals. New brand onboarding went from a bespoke project to a configuration exercise, and the working practices we set became the programme default.
“The way your team works is how we want the programme to work.”