Akinon — leading e-commerce frontend
I led the frontend team on large-scale, high-traffic e-commerce platforms, owning architectural decisions, code quality, hiring and technical training.
- Next.js
- React
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Micro-frontend
Context
I spent close to five years at Akinon — the first eighteen months as a frontend developer, the following three and a half years leading the frontend team. The platforms were e-commerce storefronts for global and local brands: systems where traffic and conversion land directly on revenue, and where a performance regression has a measurable cost.
As a developer
I used Next.js and the modern JavaScript ecosystem to build SEO-friendly, high-performance and reusable UI components. The win was not any single brand's page; it was making the component library reusable across multiple brand projects.
As a team lead
I led the frontend team. The responsibility came down to three things:
- Architectural decisions. Which abstraction gets shared across brands and which stays project-specific. A component shared at the wrong boundary costs more than a duplicated one.
- Code quality. Review culture and shared practice — a standard that is not enforced is not a standard.
- People. Hiring new team members, technical training and process management.
In hindsight
The technical part of leading a team is not giving up writing code; it is predicting correctly which decisions are reversible. Letting the team move fast on the reversible ones and slowing down on the ones that are not — that distinction turned out to be the most useful thing I learned.