[Case Study] Scalable Frontend Architecture: The Monorepo Transition - Twiga Foods

Status	Done
Role	Product Manager
Tech Stack	Nx, Next.js (Multi-Zones), GraphQL (BFF), Verce

🚀 Key Metrics at a Glance

Metric	Improvement	Impact
Deployment Speed	~40% faster	CI/CD time reduced
Engineer Onboarding	Same-day commits	From days to hours
Logistics Op Cost	15% reduction	Via data optimisation

1. Executive Summary

This initiative involved the architectural overhaul of the company’s frontend ecosystem, transitioning from fragmented, independently hosted codebases to a unified Nx-powered monorepo. The goal was to consolidate both customer-facing platforms (e.g., e-commerce dashboards) and internal logistics tools into a single, high-performance environment utilizing Micro-frontends (Multi-Zones).

graph LR
    User((User/Client)) --> Router{Vercel / Next.js <br/>Domain Router}
    
    subgraph "The Monorepo (NX)"
        Router --> Auth[Auth Zone]
        Router --> Logistics[Logistics / WMS Zone]
        Router --> Commercial[Commercial / Shoko Zone]
        
        subgraph "Shared Resources"
            UI[Shared UI Kit]
            GQL[GraphQL BFF Library]
        end
        
        Auth --- UI
        Logistics --- UI
        Commercial --- UI
        Commercial --- GQL
    end

2. Problem Statement

Before the overhaul, multiple Next.js codebases were hosted separately across GitHub and Bitbucket. This fragmentation created compounding pain across the engineering team:

Workflow Inefficiency: High complexity in local setups and slow developer onboarding — often taking a full day or more for a new engineer to get a working local environment.
Build Performance Bottlenecks: A minor CSS change in the WMS triggered 20-minute full-site builds, wasting CI/CD resources and blocking parallel work.
Dependency Conflicts: Inconsistent library versions across different apps led to “revenue attribution errors” and unpredictable quality gaps between platforms.

Maintenance Overhead:

Duplicate efforts in UI components and data-fetching logic meant the same bug often existed in multiple places simultaneously.

3. Discovery & Research

3.1 How We Validated the Problem

The problem was not hypothetical. Having transitioned from an Associate Software Engineer role into Product Management at Twiga, I had lived the fragmentation firsthand. This dual perspective was critical - it meant I could translate developer pain into product decisions with precision, not just inference.

Formal user research was supplemented by structured informal discovery: