This post explores how BBC's WebCore initiative required reorganizing the engineering organization alongside its technical refactoring to build a unified website for all BBC digital services.
•BBC's digital services (News, Sport, iPlayer, Sounds) were built independently with separate departments, causing duplicated features and inconsistent user experiences.
•WebCore strategy aimed to standardize technology, build shared horizontal capabilities, and share commodity components across teams.
•A new Core Services department was created to focus on platform and enablement rather than audience-facing products.
•As the platform grew to 100+ engineers, the "zero duplication" goal created friction, leading to a pragmatic approach to technical debt using Component Health tooling.
•Team Topologies and inversion of control principles were adopted to empower tenant teams with self-service interfaces.
BBC Product & Technology - Medium