This newsletter has historically been mostly about design systems. However, as frontend engineering continues to evolve, the challenges extend far beyond UI components. My roles have expanded to address these broader concerns, and I want this newsletter to reflect that growth.

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Frontend engineering has changed dramatically over the past decade. The days of simply writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are long gone. Today, product engineers must navigate an ever-growing ecosystem of tools and workflows. This complexity has led to the rise of dedicated teams focused on streamlining frontend development: Frontend Platform teams.

A Frontend Platform team provides the tools, infrastructure, and best practices that enable product engineers to build frontends more efficiently. They abstract away complexity, allowing engineers to focus on shipping features faster with higher quality

This discipline goes by many names—Frontend Infrastructure, Frontend Operations, Frontend Tooling, Product Engineering Infrastructure, and App Enablement. However, "Frontend Platform" stands out because it aligns with existing Platform teams, making it easier for organizations to understand its value. While frontend and backend platform teams work with different tools, both share the same charter: abstracting complexity so product engineers can focus on delivering features.

Some areas that a Frontend Platform team typically covers include:

Bundlers and compilers

A Frontend Platform team configures and maintains tools like Webpack and Vite. These libraries process and optimize JavaScript, CSS, and assets for deployment by transforming, minifying, and bundling code efficiently.

CSS architecture and tools

A Frontend Platform team makes decisions about which CSS libraries to use, and configures the tooling for them.

Dependency management

A Frontend Platform team keeps dependencies up to date, resolves security vulnerabilities, and maintains package managers like npm, yarn, or pnpm.

Design systems

A Frontend Platform team builds and maintains a collection of reusable UI components, guidelines, and documentation that ensure consistency, efficiency, and accessibility in frontend development.

Frontend Observability

A Frontend Platform team chooses and manages monitoring and logging tools like Sentry, Honeycomb, Datadog, and Amplitude, that track frontend performance, errors, and user interactions to improve reliability and debugging.

Frontend testing

A Frontend Platform team designs a suite of testing methodologies, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, using frameworks like Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, and Playwright to ensure application stability and correctness. Capturing code coverage and driving testing across an organization.

GraphQL tooling

A Frontend Platform team configures and maintains libraries and utilities like Apollo and GraphiQL that help developers efficiently query, cache, and manage GraphQL APIs while improving frontend data fetching.

HTTP request tooling

A Frontend Platform team builds wrappers around request APIs to streamline making, caching, and optimizing API calls for efficient data fetching and state synchronization.

State management

A Frontend Platform team proposes, configures, and maintains libraries like Redux, Zustand, and React Context that handle application state, ensuring predictable updates and synchronization across components.

Static analysis tooling

A Frontend Platform team configures and maintains tools like ESLint and Prettier to analyze code for style, security, and performance issues, enforcing best practices at buildtime.

TypeScript configuration

A Frontend Platform team sets up TypeScript to enforce type safety and reduce runtime errors.

Web performance

A Frontend Platform team optimizes frontend applications for speed and efficiency using techniques like lazy loading, code splitting, CDN caching, and Core Web Vitals monitoring. It sets up performance budgets and ensures product engineers don’t accidentally degrade web performance.

As frontend applications grow in complexity, having a dedicated team to handle these concerns ensures a more scalable, maintainable, and performant ecosystem. The future of frontend engineering lies in establishing strong platform teams that empower developers to build better products, faster.

Does your organization have a Frontend Platform team? What challenges have you faced in setting one up? What impact has it had on your development process? Reply to this email and let’s discuss!