Case study
Komerční banka
Standards that hold across dozens of teams.
A bank does not build one application but dozens — each with its own team, schedule and priorities. Technical direction is not imposed there by decree; it works when the proposed solution is more usable than the alternative.
Frontend Tech Lead · Architectural standards · Design system · Guild leadership
01
Context: an environment you cannot dictate to
Internal web applications are built in parallel across many teams. Without a shared direction every team solves the same problems differently — and the differences only surface when something has to change across all of them.
02
My role and responsibility
For more than four years I was responsible for frontend strategy across internal applications. That meant deciding technical direction, setting standards, assessing risk and finding solutions that make sense to more than one team.
03
A shared design system
I contributed to the development and adoption of a shared design system. The critical part was not the components themselves but setting them up so teams would want to use them — covering the real cases and leaving room to deviate where the deviation is justified.
04
The frontend guild
I led the frontend guild long-term. It was where decisions got discussed before they hardened into code, and where one team's experience reached the others. Without it, standards age faster than they spread.
05
Specific technical initiatives
I also handled standalone assignments — an internal chatbot, and the selection and rollout of a new charting library. In that kind of choice the feature list is not what decides it: long-term maintainability, licensing, and how easily the owning team can live with it are.
06
Assessing risk
Part of the role was naming what happens if a decision turns out wrong. In banking the cost of change is high, so a choice that can be revisited later often beats a technically more elegant one with no way back.
07
What I take from it
An enterprise estate teaches that architecture is not only the design of a system but the way a decision reaches the people expected to work by it. That is exactly the part I carry into solution architecture work with other clients.
Standards do not work because they are approved. They work when using them is easier for a team than working around them — and that is design work, not organisational work.