RRU 061: Should Companies Have a Dedicated Frontend Team? from React Round Up

Today the panel is discussing the necessity of companies having a dedicated frontend team. They begin by discussing the technologies that might be used by a dedicated frontend team. According to the panel, the necessity of a frontend team is determined by the size of the company. When you try to have a frontend team too soon, it ends up being a huge debacle, but once you get bigger and have multiple teams, it gets more useful. A company is ready for a dedicated frontend team when it is able to build with a common set of components.

The panel discusses the concept of ownership in a company. Nader believes that things should be run where there is a team that’s in charge of building a component, and once the component has shipped, they are no longer in charge. The other panelists disagree with that method because they believe there is a danger of the project getting bloated. Thomas shares his experience with working for Facebook and Lucas talks about how he has previously set up his teams. They talk about the necessity of having a design system before having a React design system, and they all agree that it is useful Nader shares his experience with his brother working for Cartoon network and the design rules they had for the websites for each show like Dexter’s Lab and PowerPuff Girls.

Since the panel agrees on the importance of consistency in visual communication and designs, they delve into deciding what is owned by the design system and what is shared between other teams, who maintains these things, and how to differentiate between the different kinds of components. They talk about the idea of Atomic Design in programming, separating component into categories called names like atoms, molecules, organisms, etc. Nader talks about his experience with this method. He found it difficult because components didn’t always fit cleanly into one category. The panel believes that it all comes back to ownership and it is important that companies are handling ownership well

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