The setting
The assignment was a second sales channel: a native app to complement the existing web shop and reach buyers who preferred to shop from the phone.
The defining detail of kfzteile24 is the vehicle picker. Buyers select their car once, and from that point on every part shown is guaranteed to fit.
My role
I owned the iOS app from early stages: architecture, implementation, releases. As the channel proved itself and the team grew, the role shifted from building the app to building the team that would carry it after I left.
The calls that mattered
- An architecture sized for an e-commerce roadmap: catalogue, vehicle picker, checkout, all on patterns a growing team could follow without decoding them.
- I helped hire the senior engineers and shaped how they were onboarded into the codebase.
- Growing the next lead from the hired engineers.
How it ended
I handed the lead role to an engineer grown from inside the team and stepped out. After my exit, the lead and a junior shipped the native checkout front to back within a single sprint. The codebase was built so that exactly that stays possible: I wrote up that story, and why boring codebases enable it, in the notes.
