---
title: "Akinon — leading e-commerce frontend"
description: "I led the frontend team on large-scale, high-traffic e-commerce platforms, owning architectural decisions, code quality, hiring and technical training."
period: "2019 — 2024"
role: "Frontend Team Lead"
stack: ["Next.js", "React", "JavaScript", "TypeScript", "Micro-frontend"]
url: "https://ibrahimasik.com/en/projects/akinon-frontend-leadership"
site: "https://www.akinon.com"
locale: "en"
---

# 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.

- **Role:** Frontend Team Lead
- **Period:** 2019 — 2024
- **Stack:** Next.js, React, JavaScript, TypeScript, Micro-frontend
- **Live:** https://www.akinon.com

## 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.